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Connor, Steven. Living by Numbers : In Defence of Quantity, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2016. ProQuest Ebook
 L IV ING BY
NUMBE R S
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Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

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 by n u m
b e r s
li v i n g
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 Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
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 C ont e nts

1 V e r n a c u l a r M at h e m at i c s 7

2 Q u a n ta l i t y 2 0

3 Hor ror of Number 53

4 Mo d e r n M e a s u r e s 72

5 Lots 108
6 H i l a r i o u s A r i t h m et i c 1 2 9
7 P l a y i ng t h e N u m b e r s 1 6 1
8 K e e p i ng t h e B e at 1 9 9
9 T h e N u m e r at e E y e 2 2 1
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1 0 E n o ug h 2 6 6
R efer ences 273

P ho t o A c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s 2 8 9

I nd e x 2 9 1

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 1
Ver na cula r Mathem at i c s

‘There’s nothing you can’t turn into a sum, for there’s nothing
but what’s got number in it.’1
Bartle Massey in George Eliot, Adam Bede (1859)

Sooner or later, in writing anything, be it novel, memoir, essay, annual

report or sonnet, one will have to write the words that will stand, or
be allowed to stand, as the first, whether or not these happen to be
words like ‘Chapter One’ which explicitly start the count. There are
all kinds of ways in which writers can lament, defy, denounce, ignore
or attempt to evade this ordinality, but all of them testify to its in-
escapable force, which can be transacted with, but never transcended.
All acts of writing will have, not only to have beginnings, but to have
been begun. In any ordinal proceeding, any opening sentence, or
opening word of such a sentence, begins a count, an order of things.
The fact that words have to be in some order or another is just
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one of the simplest ways in which verbal and numerical signs are
commingled. Along the way, this book aims to consider some of the
many other forms in which words, signs and numbers work on and
with each other. It is prompted by what seems to be a striking con-
temporary contradiction. On the one hand, our lives are more than
ever penetrated by and even perhaps governed by number, in all its
aspects. On the other, it seems to many, and perhaps especially those
who think of themselves as participating in the world of arts, culture
or the humanities, that number has come to be a kind of tyrant virus
in human affairs, such that the preservation of our humanity, not
to mention its earthly vicar, ‘the humanities’, depends upon our
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 l i v i n g b y n u m b e rs

recession from number, and the rescue of what are thought to be

qualities from their reduction to mere quantities. The strength and
prevalence of this anti-numerical animus is remarkable, not least
because there has never been a time in human history in which it has
been less possible to distinguish quantitative thinking and living
from qualitative. Just at the moment, in other words, at which the
commingling of quality and quantity has become both unignorable
and inextricable, an anti-numerical ideology founded on the prin-
ciple that it should be possible to separate quality from quantity
maintains itself with unexampled vigour and self-reproducing
virulence.
Later chapters in this book will consider the motives, forms and
effects of this number-phobia, while also trying to show that, far
from representing the inhuman, numbers are intrinsic to almost all
conceivable kinds of human being. We ought perhaps to think of our
relation to numbers in the way suggested by the old man Chremes
in Terence’s play Heauton timorumenos (The Self-tormentor) who de-
clares: ‘Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto.’ ‘I am a man:
I think nothing human alien to me.’ Numbers may seem inhuman
and yet the making out of numbers and numerical relations seems
one of the most identifiably and irrepressibly human of accomplish-
ments. The question is perhaps whether numbers are alien or not to
human beings – including perhaps the question of whether that
‘nihil’ in Terence’s phrase is to be considered a number, or itself a
kind of alien principle within number. Chremes’ words, admired,
among many others, by Augustine, Cicero and Seneca, have often
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been taken as a statement of tolerant, large-minded humanism. In

pricking the grandeur of the sentiment, Beckett’s ‘The sport of kings
is our passion . . . nothing human is foreign to us, once we have
digested the racing news’ nevertheless maintains intact the contrast
between narrow-minded accountancy and benevolent solidarity.2 Yet,
in fact, accountancy provides precisely the original context of the
utterance. Chremes is at this point in the play defending himself
against accusations of meddling in the affairs of his rich neighbour
Menedemus, the ‘self-tormentor’ of the play’s title, who has set
himself to unnecessary toil on his estates in remorse for driving away
his son with his severity. What Chremes is concerned with in his
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 v e r n a c u l a r m at h e m ati c s

neighbour is not primarily his happiness or well-being, but the ab-

surdly unprofitable nature of the bargain he is striking with himself:

You’re sixty years of age, or more, at a guess. Nobody in this

area has better or more valuable land. You have quite a lot of
slaves, but you perform their tasks yourself as assiduously
as if you had none. I never go out so early in the morning or
return home so late in the evening that I don’t see you on
your farm digging or ploughing or carrying something. In
short you never slacken off or take any thought for yourself.
I’m pretty sure you’re not enjoying this way of life. ‘Well,’
you may say, ‘I’m not satisfied with the amount of work
that’s getting done here.’ [‘at enim’ dices ‘quantum hic
operis fiat paenitet.’] But if you spent the effort which you
spend on doing the work on putting them to work, you’d be
better off.3

So it looks as though, for Terence at least, at this moment, the state-

ment of the most absolute and inclusive human sympathy is focused
by questions of quantity and measure.
The uk Daily Mail newspaper reported on 6 August 2015 under
the headline ‘police will not probe break-ins at homes
with odd number’ that, in an effort to save resources, Leicester-
shire police had been sending out teams to investigate reported
break-ins only if the house number in question was even. The report
quoted Gavin Hales of the Police Foundation, an independent think-
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tank that studies policing, saying: ‘The notion of denying 50 per cent
of victims a basic service, based on something as arbitrary as their
house number, looks ethically dubious at best.’ Meanwhile, Leicester
South mp Jon Ashworth called the move ‘ridiculous and haphazard’.4
Let us assume charitably that Leicester police are not reducing
their burglary support in order to free up more time for inter-
constabulary football matches, but in order to be able to increase the
amount of resource for other, possibly more effective services. So at
issue really is not the reduction of services. The outrage attaches to
the method used to determine which homes are visited. Commenta-
tors were said to be appalled that the service might be reduced
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through means that are ‘arbitrary’ or ‘haphazard’. But if the service

is to be reduced, what possible other basis might there be? Ethnic
origin? Debt status? Length of residence? Tax bracket? Criminal
record? Day of the week? What is wrong with the scheme is not that
it is arbitrary, but that it is not arbitrary enough – since it might in
time encourage the belief that people living in odd-numbered houses
could henceforth be plundered with impunity. The only way to be sure
the reduction was applied evenly would be to alternate between the
odd-number rule and the even-number rule at random, perhaps
through flipping a coin.
We do not seem to believe that public services, which we experi-
ence as particular individuals, should be managed statistically, in
terms of large numbers. It is one of the clichés of healthcare report-
ing in the uk that it is scandalous for there to be a ‘postcode lottery’
when it comes to things like cancer treatment. But if it were in fact
necessary for there to be variation in treatment and outcomes (and,
though variation is certainly undesirable, it is just as certainly
unavoidable), it would actually be much better for the variation to be
the result of a lottery than the result of socio-economic variation,
which is really what is being complained about with the phrase ‘post-
code lottery’. These concerns are a sign of how puzzling but also
how pervasive and intimate our relationship is with number in any
collectivity in which the gap between large and small numbers is
significant. It is often said and no doubt also felt that human beings
living in large collectivities are more and more subjected to purely
numerical or statistical considerations, but the truth is that human
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beings, like all organisms in this bit of the universe, have never lived
apart from number, but always lived at the intersection of two orders
of number, the small and the large. We all want to be treated justly,
but justice, at least in the Kantian perspective, involves trying to make
small and large numbers accord with each other, not trying to re-
move numbers from the equation, or to remove any kind of equation
from our reasoning and what we feel about our reasoning.
I am going to propose in this book that we have no choice but to
make accommodation to number. This will turn out, I think, not to
be nearly as bad as it may seem, since it is the case not only that we
in fact want no other choice, but that this is a choice that we have
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already made, for a very long time, and on many different fronts. We
could do with understanding better the subtlety and pervasiveness
of the agreements that we already make with numbers, in all their
dimensions, of quantity, magnitude, frequency and risk.

Inside the Avalanche

Ian Hacking refers memorably and quotably at the beginning of
his The Taming of Chance to the ‘avalanche of printed numbers’ that
became part of the experience of nineteenth-century Britain.5 Hack-
ing’s book addresses itself principally to the history of statistics, and
it is as part of this history that number and numbers have usually
been considered. It is as a result of the faith in statistics, at least in
the early part of the nineteenth century, that it can be said that ‘Num-
bers were a fetish, numbers for their own sake.’6 This association of
numbers with statistical thinking means that they are subject to the
same reading as Hacking applies to statistics as a whole, namely that
they represent a ‘machinery of information and control’.7 In a world
in which laws began to be represented as numerical constants, you
could ‘collect more numbers, and more regulations will appear’.8
Hacking’s is only a more Foucauldian and uncompromising version
of a tendency that is apparent through most writing on what William
Petty had called ‘political arithmetic’.9 The taming of chance means
that a subject that has its basis in error and variation as much as in
norms and regularity is pushed towards control:
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The taming of chance seems irresistible. Let a man propose

an antistatistical idea to reflect individuality and to resist the
probabilification of the universe; the next generation effort-
lessly coopts it so that it becomes part of the standard
machinery of information and control.10

This has been an addictively congenial picture for many who

have recognized and attempted to set themselves against the grow-
ing dominion of number. But the use of numbers for government is
not the whole truth, and, for my purposes, not the most interesting
or important thing about the fate of number in the nineteenth
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century. For, whatever the unease and revulsion it may have caused,
Hacking’s ‘avalanche of numbers’ ensured also that numerical
consciousness and what might be called quantitative affect became
pervasive. If in one sense mathematics secures the division between
art and science, in another sense, mathematics increasingly occupies
a strange position, as a third thing, reducible neither to science nor
art, yet in a sense participating in both. Words cannot be the simple
opposite of number, since, let us not forget, numbers are also words.
It will become clear in what follows that words, like everything else,
are becoming increasingly number-like.
So, far from experiencing an avalanche of number, a simple
white-out, number has entered into quality. Quantity has become
qualitative. To speak of an avalanche of numbers, as Hacking does,
is to evoke some uniform, indeterminate substance, like mud or
snow, under which one may be crushed or asphyxiated. In what I
have to say, this deathly indifference will be an important part of the
experience or apprehension of number; but it is precisely because of
this quality of indifference that number is able to become so poly-
morphously alive, that the powers and qualities of number can be so
various. It is precisely because numbers are all the same that they can
become so plural and can be the vehicles of so many kinds of value.
Without number, there can be no growth, no transformation, no in-
vention, no desire, no value. Yes, numbers can seem to be the dealers
of death, even, as Chapter Three, ‘Horror of Number’, will propose,
to be identifiable with death itself: yet without number, life is scarcely
conceivable.
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There are numbers everywhere in modern life. Numbers are used

to identify – service numbers became common during the First
World War, and commodities were increasingly identified with serial
numbers from the 1920s onwards. Passports, bank accounts, insur-
ance policies, share certificates, even banknotes started to have serial
numbers. It is just because of this omnipresence of number that
numbers are not only used to put or keep people in their place.
Sports fans live a life of impassioned statistics. The discourses of
probability and risk provide a shimmering background to every
decision that we make. People strive to amass money, but they also
have target weights and personal bests. Getting and spending does
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not always or merely lay waste our powers; it also occupies, exercises
and elaborates those powers. The work of calculation is not abstract,
inhuman, anonymous and dominative, or it is not merely these
things; it is part of the changing texture of our engagements and
investments, our dreads, dreams and desires.
Under these circumstances, the argument that the order of num-
ber is set over against free, spontaneous existence, acting always as
its impediment or cancer, or as a form of social control, that number,
in short, is deployed as a mechanism of Power against Life, must
seem ludicrously, almost pitiably crude. Nevertheless the idea re-
mains deeply embedded, even systematic in contemporary thought,
an idea that we think with too implicitly for us to be able to think
about it. Against this idea, I will have to try to show two things. The
first is that word and number have, since at least the beginning of
the seventeenth century, been drawing ever closer together, and
indeed have become more and more entangled, if never exactly to
the point of indistinguishability (that would no longer be entangle-
ment). Indeed, the various ways in which number has been projected
or excreted as the antagonist of life are the by-products of this
commingling. The second is to show that there is – both as a con-
sequence, and in any case – no pure realm of number, that the idea
of pure number is in fact a fuzzy and primitive approximation.
Language must include mathematics, because it must include the
language of mathematics – numbers are signs, and there are no
numbers which cannot be signified, along with plenty of numbers
that can only be signified, because there will never be any way to see
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them. More controversially, mathematics must include signs,

because without signs there is no proof. Words and numbers are not
extrinsic to one another.
This means that there is no autonomous realm of number. It
follows that there can be no intrinsic being of number either, no one
thing that number essentially is, either in a negative or in a positive
sense. Both of these bad ideas are energetically ventilated in the work
of Alain Badiou, currently among the most influential of contempor-
ary Platonists. According to Badiou, the degraded form of number
is the being-in-the-world, or perhaps the simple being-the-world, of
‘capitalism’. Indeed, what is held to be most horrifying about
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Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I, 1514.

capitalism is its alleged ‘reduction’ of all human and natural pos-

sibility to numerability. Against this, Badiou demands and offers us
an ontology of number, the claim that number is the truth of being
itself. It is very hard to make much sense of this claim, which seems
to be sustained largely by the caustic force of Badiou’s scorn for all
the merely derived or inessential forms which number or being
may take, which, as in Plato’s theory of absolute forms, seems to
make it necessary, on the rebound, that there be ideal, absolute and
immaculately self-equalling numerical forms.
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Number, like language, is an open totality. They are both systems

under construction, which, as they ramify, inevitably become less
identical with themselves. Increasingly, not only is nature written, as
Galileo wrote, in the language of mathematics, language is written in
the language of mathematics; and the kind of language we call litera-
ture is closer to that kind of mathematical language than other kinds.
Numerus is not numen; not etymologically, and not philosophically
either. Latin numerus may be an ablaut variant of the same Indo-
European base from which Greek nomos, law, usage, melody, derives,
both cognate with Greek nemein, to distribute or manage. Number’s
name is therefore first cousin to the name of name. The study of
numbers might very well be called numeronomy rather than numerology,
since it is the study of usages (and melodies).
In fact, one way to characterize the outlook I want to try to
encourage is as an anti-numerology. By numerology, I mean the
exercise of number-magic. Numerology is not so much the belief
that number governs everything as it is the belief in the non-
mathematical powers of certain numbers – lucky numbers, magic
numbers, ‘numbers of power’, the Number of the Beast and so on.
It is very hard for anybody interested in number to keep their head
clear of the number-magic of numerology. The usefulness of prime
numbers in encryption, a topic that has become important for us
recently, can encourage magical attitudes towards these numbers,
and, indeed, mathematicians themselves are oddly prone to a kind
of obsessiveness about certain kinds of number. But numerology can
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Detail from Dürer’s Melencolia I showing a magic number square.

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tell us nothing about numbers, even if it can tell us plenty about the
power of number over us, a power that we ourselves give it, in the
duality that characterizes much magical thinking.
It is very easy to fall into a numerological delirium that strives
to see art, literature and culture as governed by or expressive of
putative mathematical absolutes – Platonic solids, the Golden
Section, that sort of thing. This lamentable tendency is clearly
illustrated by Quentin Meillassoux’s study of Mallarmé’s ‘Un coup
de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’. The first part of the study aims
to show that Mallarmé’s poem is in fact completely governed by
number, in a way that also allows it to be understood as a reflection
on its own status as poetry, caught between the principle of regular
metre (embodied for French poets in the twelve-beat of the Alexan-
drine line) and the unpredictable patterns of free verse. Meillassoux
wants to explain how it is that a particular number could be number
itself, which he regards as equivalent (regarding things as equiva-
lent is indispensable to his method) to being identical with chance.
‘If we obtain the Number that can be identified with Chance, it
would possess the unalterable eternity of contingency itself.’11 After
much hushed lighting of candles and laying out of ceremonial
objects on Meillassoux’s part, it turns out that the way in which
Mallarmé will achieve this is by making the metrical unit of his
poem the total number of words in it. It will thus constitute con-
tingency as destiny, presenting itself at once as free and constrained.
It turns out that there are 707 words in the poem (there aren’t really,
so Meillassoux has to fudge the count). Seven is chosen because it
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‘represents a medium term between the classical metric and pure

chance – 7 rhymes in a sonnet, seven stars in the Great Bear or
“Septentrion”’.12 The number 707 is special because it seems to enact
a doubling or rhyming with itself around or across the nothingness
of an abyss – identified both with the whirlpool of the blank ocean
and the central fold of the central opening of which the poem
consists. It is therefore ‘the Meter by way of which 7 rhymes with
itself across the gulf that separates it from itself ’. 13 Meillassoux’s
analysis has little to tell us about number in itself, but is a delightful
object lesson in what we allow ourselves to do to and with the idea
of number.
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If we are to understand the richness and the variety of the ways

in which number and quantity work on us, we need first of all to put
plain numerality in place of numerology, accepting the principle of
number’s indifference that is articulated in Margaret Cavendish’s
The Blazing World (1666) by the spirits who respond to the Empress
heroine’s enquiries about the nature of number:

Then she inquired, whether there was no mystery in num-

bers? No other mystery, answered the spirits, but reckoning
or counting; for Numbers are only marks of remembrance.
But what do you think of the number four, said she, which
Cabbalists make such ado withal, and of the number of ten,
when they say that ten is all, and that all numbers are virtu-
ally comprehended in four? We think, answered they, that
Cabbalists have nothing else to do but to trouble their heads
with such useless fancies; for naturally there is no such thing
as prime or all in numbers; nor is there any other mystery in
numbers.14

The Empress finds this hard to take, and tries out a few more
numerological doctrines:

Then the Empress asked, whether the number of six was a

symbol of matrimony, as being made up of male and female,
for two into three is six. If any number can be a symbol of
matrimony, answered the spirits, it is not six, but two; if two
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may be allowed to be a number: for the act of matrimony is

made up of two joined in one.15

Even when the Empress raises the stakes to the highest level, by
asking about the number of God, her interlocutors persist in their
patient rebuttals of her desire for numerical mystery:

She asked again, what they said to the number of seven?

whether it was not an emblem of God, because Cabbalists
say, that it is neither begotten, nor begets any other number?
There can be no emblem of God, answered the spirits; for if
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we do not know what God is, how can we make an emblem

of him? Nor is there any number in God, for God is the
perfection himself, but numbers are imperfect; and as for
the begetting of numbers, it is done by multiplication and
addition; but subtraction is as a kind of death to numbers. If
there be no mystery in numbers, replied the Empress, then
it is in vain to refer to the creation of the world to certain
numbers, as Cabbalists do. The only mystery of numbers,
answered they, concerning the creation of the world, is that
as numbers do multiply, so does the world.16

The power of number is an open power, and a power of opening.

If this is not a book that will unveil the secret power of certain
numbers, then neither is it any kind of contribution to mathematical
theory or the philosophy of mathematics. I do however think there
is a great deal to interest us in the ways in which people think and
write about these topics, especially if they themselves are involved in
them, because such thinking is part of the rich mulligatawny of ideas
that we have of mathematics, even, we might say, the fantasy that we
have about mathematics. And, heaven knows, mathematics is satur-
ated and supercharged with fantasy, not least because it is supposed
to be the area of mental life in which fantasy is reduced to its absolute
minimum; there is no more self-indulgent idea than the idea of
‘rigour’ and no more imperious fantasy than the fantasy of escape
from fantasy.
In Where Mathematics Comes From (2001) George Lakoff and
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Rafael Nuñez have sought to inaugurate ‘the cognitive science of

mathematics’, arguing that ‘Mathematics is deep, fundamental, and
essential to the human experience’ and that, though ‘crying out to
be understood’, it has not been made sense of in cognitive terms.17 I
want with this book to make a similar move with regard to the cul-
tures of number, opening and extending the understanding of the
rich, tough, subtle imagination of quantity, extent and magnitude
that runs through human life. I am interested in getting more people
more interested in the ordinary ways in which number is lived, which
is to say the affective, psychological, oneiric, economic, sexual, ludic
and sexual life of number, for which open series we might allow the
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composite expression, the ‘cultural life of number’. Where Lakoff

and Nuñez are interested in where mathematics cognitively comes
from, my concern is with vernacular mathematics – how we do
things with numbers and how they do things with us.
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 2
Qua nta lit y

Doing Mathematics
Some of us study mathematics, but all of us, to some degree, do
mathematics all the time. We do not say that we do literature or
geography or physics, unless we mean that we are studying them at
school. But mathematics always involves a kind of doing. It is for
just this reason that some more high-minded mathematicians, the
kind for whom mathematics is a matter of concepts rather than
calculations, tend to see the doing of mathematics as a wearisome
and rather vulgar necessity.
On the face of it, the difference between being and doing math-
ematics ought to be clear. There are countable numbers everywhere,
in flocks of birds, tree rings, cycles of the moon, fluctuations of tem-
perature, births, deaths, salaries and marriages, but the enumeration
of those numbers is a distinct operation. What we call mathematics
occurs almost entirely on the side of enumeration, of counting and
the counted rather than the countable. There may be numbers every-
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where in nature, but they are not really numbers until they have been
numbered, made explicit as numbers or told off as countable things.
This depends upon what Alain Badiou has called the operation of
the ‘count-as-one’, the possibility of treating things as though they
were equivalent and therefore addable units, and what we might on
our own account call counting-as-countable.1
Numeration requires an apprehension of number as an abstract
system, which allows the ‘threeness’ of three trees, three sheep and
three stones to be recognized. Oddly enough, one might think, this
recognition is not itself necessarily numerical, for it depends upon
the principle of tallying. This is the system that allows a shepherd to
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keep count of the members of a flock of sheep without having to

count them, by matching the members of the flock one by one to a
series of notches on a tally stick, or an umpire to count off the balls
in an over with the coins he transfers from pocket to pocket. The
shepherd need not have any idea at all of how many sheep he has
in his charge, or indeed how many may at any point be missing. He
just needs to button up one series to another parallel series. What is
more, it should be apparent that this kind of one-to-one matching
is in fact what occurs in an act of counting and in any operation in
which numbers of things are lined up with each other. Such match-
ing may be as much geometrical as arithmetical, for it may allow or
require us simply to see that certain shapes or quantities pair up
without remainder. All weights and measures are defined in terms
of matchings.
If we want to say that this kind of matching is not really math-
ematical, because one is not being mathematical unless one is
working with numbers, considered as numbers, as opposed to sim-
ply matching things, one would also have to admit that none of the
machineries we employ to help us do our mathematics, or even do it
for us, such as the fingers or toes, the tally stick, the abacus or the
computer, are themselves mathematical, in that they all just match
things up rather than really discerning or determining relations.
They certainly seem to do mathematics but cannot be said to know
that they are doing it, and it might seem that knowing what you are
doing is definitional when it comes to mathematical reasoning. But
then it becomes exceedingly hard to say what there is in calculation
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that is anything other than these actions of matching, only per-

formed not with shapes but with quantities, in which it is not five
fingers or sheep that are of interest, but five fives, of anything. Still,
however, the principle of matching persists, in the very fact that we
do not have to count every five, just to check groups off.
A great deal of this kind of matching occurs in the natural world
– wherever, for example, questions of fit, coupling or concordance
may be important. Antibodies do not really recognize foreign organ-
isms, but they do form bonds of correspondence with them, which
involve matching of elements. The most important form of matching
is surely pairing, of which there are probably two principal kinds. In
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one kind, distinct things come together to form a couple, or a two

that counts as one, as when two animals mate. In the other, some
entity duplicates itself, as, for example, when a sequence of genetic
code makes copies of itself. These processes, in which two becomes
one and one becomes two, themselves come together in sexual
reproduction. Such matching is common in aspects of the more
formalized arts, like poetry and music, in which we may be required
to recognize relationships of correspondence and divergence.

Given to Number
Can there be numbers in themselves, prior to and separate from the
act of counting them? What does it mean to say that there is, or there
are, a certain number of crows on a wire, apples in a tub, or atoms
in the known universe? Our hesitation over whether to attach a
singular or plural verb to the phrase a certain number may help us think
about this. For we always have the choice to make about whether to
think of a number of things as a multiplicity or as a singularity, as a
spreading out or a summing up. It is a choice as to what we intend
to do with it. To count something is to draw out one aspect of its
nature. It is to spell out or make explicit at least one aspect of what
it is. What do I mean when I say that I have ten digits, that there are
two types of camel or seven colours in the rainbow? Quantitative
statements of this kind are all in the subjunctive rather than the in-
dicative: if you affirm that there are ten of something, you are saying
that, were you to count them, following the rules of counting (dis-
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tinguishing items which will count as one, counting everything only

once, and telling them off according to some accepted sequence of
number words), you would find that when you got to the last digit,
you would be uttering the word ‘ten’. Furthermore, if you were to
count the items again in just the same way, you would get the same
result. To say that there are ten digits, two camels or seven colours
is actually to lay a wager as to all the things that would happen under
these defined circumstances. In this sense, a number is a prediction
masquerading as a predication.
So something happens to the object subjected to the act of count-
ing, something that both is and is not quite a statement of what it is
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already. A parable by Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Argumentum Ornitho-

logicum’, reflects on this question. It is short enough to be quoted
in full.

I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts a

second, or perhaps less; I am not sure how many birds I saw.
Was the number of birds definite or indefinite? The problem
involves the existence of God. If God exists, the number is
definite, because God knows how many birds I saw. If God
does not exist, the number is indefinite, because no one can
have counted. In this case, I saw fewer than ten birds (let us
say) and more than one, but did not see nine, eight, seven,
six, five, four, three, or two birds. I saw a number between
ten and one, which was not nine, eight, seven, six, five, etc.
That integer – not-nine, not-eight, not-seven, not-six, etc. –
is inconceivable. Ergo, God exists.2

Borges’s mock proof depends upon the belief that there cannot be
indefinite numbers. Numbers, by definition, must be definite, that
is, must be some number or other. There is the number three and
the number four, but there is no number three-or-four. Borges’s cod
God fills the gap between the indefiniteness of a certain number that
is not yet certain (the certainty that the number of birds must be
some number or other that is more than one and less than ten) and
the uncertainty as to what particular number that is. But perhaps we
do not need this gap to be filled; or, even if we do, it is perhaps a gap
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that not even God can fill. For perhaps this is the gap in which num-
ber happens, the interval in which a certain number can be made
over into a certain number, by some action of counting, or one that
will count as one.
Borges thinks (feigns to think, surely) there cannot be a world
in which there is a number that is not a definite number, and so calls
upon God to keep the score. More strictly, he calls up a God to
perform this function, a God who is ultimately no more than the
function of the one who knows, or will have known, the number of
everything in advance of its being numbered. Otherwise, things will
both be and not be what they are. But what if there is such a world, a
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world that is in fact simply the world, in which things indeed exist in
two conditions at once, between the condition of being a certain
number that has not yet been subject to enumeration, and the con-
dition of being able to be so numbered? Once something has been
numbered, it will henceforth always have been the number that has
been counted out. Until that point, however, it is only potentially that
number. Perhaps everything participates in this movement in which
the potential is made actual, or the implicit is made explicit. God is
the name either for what would occupy the place of time, or what
could exist unchangingly throughout time. But if one allows for the
reality of elapsing time, rather than using God as the bridge between
the not yet defined and the definite, then the action of rendering
some number or other of something explicit as a particular number
is a good example of the process of emergence whereby things that
are not yet become what they henceforth will have been.
Number usually participates in this emergence, and may even be
part of emergence itself. Rather than being written in the language
of number, nature allows, implies, excites and undergoes translation
into number. Given the existence of some entity given to numbering,
nature is given to number. If everything in nature is temporal, then
the direction of time is usually towards number, and through number.
Number is that to which, and through which, time moves, for time
is nothing without, and so nothing but, the movement of nothing
into number. Time is not only necessary for number to emerge, num-
ber is equally necessary for time itself to be able to pass, or to be the
movement that it is. For time to pass, there must be entities by which
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one might tell the time, where telling means counting as well as
recounting: when Nathaniel Fairfax needed a Germanic word for
mathematics in his strange project of delatinizing metaphysics, he
called it ‘talecraft’.3 Narration and number seem to be tightly
twinned: as James Joyce has it in Finnegans Wake, ‘haven’t I told you,
every telling has a taling, and that’s the he and she of it.’4 There must
be distinction, distance and difference for there to be time, and num-
ber provides the primary language of that distinction. I can only
cease to be one thing and become another thing, or be a thing in one
state and become that thing in another state, through a process that
produces a countable result, or may do, as one becoming two. As
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A. N. Whitehead remarks, ‘Arithmetic of course enters into your

nature, so far as that nature involves a multiplicity of things.’5
Numbering is just one example of the many ways in which things
can be ‘prehended’, or taken to be something or other. Human
beings have progressively been more and more the principal agents
of taking things to be mathematically, though they have never been
the only such agents. The things themselves cannot be said to be
already what they will become and therefore turn out to have been.
That is, they cannot be what they are solely and purely in themselves,
because what that is will always turn out to depend on some other
entity, operation or set of disclosing conditions acting upon them by
taking them to be in some way or other. Mathematical reasoning
provides the best example of this necessary and inescapable exter-
iority. Mathematics is incurred by things rather than inhabiting them.
Most mathematicians are Platonists in that they believe that
mathematical truths are given and eternal, which must mean that
they are already, somehow, even maybe somewhere, in existence. For
such mathematicians, mathematical truths are worked out in the
sense that they are driven out from hiding, rather than undergoing
some change into themselves by being brought out of latency into
actuality. But where are all the places of π, exactly, or all the prime
numbers? It is hard to believe they are really stored up somewhere,
as though on some celestial, super-cerebral hard drive. Philosophy
of mathematics divides between those who believe that things like
prime numbers are disclosed by mathematical reasoning, and those
who believe they are produced by it. What I have been arguing puts
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me in the second group. The word ‘produced’ should not be under-

stood here to mean arbitrarily fabricated out of thin air. The decimal
expansion of an irrational number is produced in the sense in which
a play is produced – it is drawn out of a script, or a set of prescribed
conditions, which limit without fully determining the actualization
of that script, which will always nevertheless be the making-actual
of that script specifically. Every Hamlet is a different Hamlet, but, and
even because, all of them are stagings of Hamlet. So, in a certain
sense, the production of a number or a proof or a mathematical
result is indeed a disclosure, and a disclosure of what necessarily had
to have been the case all along. But the little tuck taken in by that
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tense – ‘what had to have been’ – is an indication that what is thought

of as the immemorial pastness of the truth that is disclosed is a prod-
uct of an unfolding history. One may think of this as a kind of slow
retrieval of what already lay latent, in which case time is seen as a
vast process of curling round backwards on itself. Or one may accept,
as I believe we would benefit from accepting, that time is the process
through which the a priori is produced a posteriori.
The number of something is therefore not part of what it is,
except insofar as what that is is its numerability, mensurability,
ponderability and so on. Every present tense is really an elliptical
future perfect – and elliptical in two senses. First of all, there is the
sense that there is always some ellipsis or elision, something un-
specified in what something is. Second, that unsaid or omitted thing
may be part of how what is may loop out and come back to itself, as
though taking an elliptical detour through the will-have-been. One
has one’s say about what something is through a kind of shoelace-
tying manoeuvre; put your finger on the knot, and hold it artificially
in place until you have performed the operation of turning it over on
itself, or running it through itself, that will enable it to hold itself
together. We create inherence, the way in which things seem to hold
together, through making things coherent, matching them up with
other things. If I want to understand the nature of war, or love, or
intelligence, or a zebra, I put a bookmark in the place where it is,
until I have completed a series of operations that will fix it in its place
relative to all the other kinds of thing that it might be, so that it then
seems to function as its own bookmark. Numbers are examples of
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Iago’s ‘many events in the womb of time, which will be delivered’,

rather than already-existing entities.6 The thing we call an object
is not something that exists already, but something that keeps
recurring, as we recur to it:

An object is an ingredient in the character of some event. In

fact the character of an event is nothing but the objects
which are ingredient in it and the ways in which those ob-
jects make their ingression into the event. Thus the theory
of objects is the theory of the comparison of events. Events
are only comparable because they body forth permanences.
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We are comparing objects in events whenever we can say,

‘There it is again.’ Objects are the elements in nature which
can ‘be again.’7

None of this is to say that there is no difference between the numer-

able and the non-numerable. There are some things which yield
much more readily to the possibility of being numbered. But there
can be nothing that is entirely immune to being numbered, if only
because anything is capable of being seen as one thing rather than
many. These conditions are clearly themselves mutable, since they
will be dependent upon the capacities either of numerating agents
or of numerating conditions to come to light, where by a numerating
agent is meant some entity capable of keeping count, and by a
numerating condition is meant some set of conditions capable of
producing numerate relations. Any field of probability can act as
such a set of numerating conditions, making it more or less likely that
some outcome or other may come about. This is both thematized in
and dramatized by the Parable of the Sower:

Behold, a sower went forth to sow; And when he sowed,

some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and
devoured them up: Some fell upon stony places, where they
had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because
they had no deepness of earth: And when the sun was up,
they were scorched; and because they had no root, they
withered away. And some fell among thorns; and the thorns
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sprung up, and choked them: But other fell into good
ground, and brought forth fruit, some an hundredfold,
some sixtyfold, some thirtyfold. Who hath ears to hear, let
him hear. (Mark 4:3–9)

Probability here comes close to probation, trying out, testing or

proving. The parable moves from a dim and unformalized intuition
that sometimes things work out better than at other times, through
to a more and more precise array of the possibilities, in order of
desirability – no germination at all, quick germination without
growth, germination followed by sustained growth and assured
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multiplication. The parable then suddenly doubles over on itself, to

offer hearing and understanding the parable as an exact parallel to
what befalls the seeds in it. Asked why he speaks to them in parables,
Jesus explains that it is a kind of distribution mechanism, designed
to pick out those who not only hear but understand what they hear.
It is usual to presume that the exchange originally written in Greek
and here rendered in English would have taken place in Aramaic, but
if so it is as though Jesus were aware in advance that the Greek word

alongside, + βολή, casting, throwing). In both the literal and the

parable itself implies a certain kind of casting or throwing (παρα-

metaphorical fields there is an automatic counting, or exterior com-

putation, in which what is not known comes to be known by being
numerically distinguished, in, or by, some landscape of likelihood.
Perhaps the very word ‘field’ embodies this history. If a field
means any open space, it also suggests some ‘opened space’, some
space of defined openness, a space thereby pushed towards the con-

cognate with Greek πλατύς, broad, and Latin planus, flat. A field is a
dition of equiprobability. The word field may be etymologically

demarcated openness; it is a space in which certain variations are

drastically limited in order that other variations may be augmented.
A field is in itself a computational machinery, perhaps even the kind
of machine of white or maximally multiplied possibility that a white
page (Latin pagus, field) or a blank screen can be.

Quality of Quantity
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So number is a liability or a tendency, not a fixed and final condition.

We live in an era in which a series of linked and reciprocally reinforc-
ing developments, theoretical and practical, have accelerated the
process of making the world more and more quantifiable, and more
and more a field of numerical operations. Theoretically, forms of
mathematics have been developed, from probability to calculus to
fluid dynamics and beyond, which enable mathematical account to
be taken of natural processes. Practically, a vast array of instruments
has been developed which allow for quantitative accounts of
processes, including psychological processes, to be developed, aug-
mented by computing machineries that are able to calculate ratios
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and relations far faster and more accurately than we can. There are
many who view such developments with a kind of angry panic, and
do everything they can to define and defend the shrinking realm of
the nonnumerable from the action of numbering. We need not here
be delayed by the question of the truth, or adequacy, of the claim that
there are qualitative truths that are under no circumstances render-
able as quantities, pleasant though it would be to dally. What we will
have to do with will be rather with the experience of having to see, or,
what may be the same thing, being increasingly able to see, the
natural and human world under the aspect of number, the experience
of the dwindling (a dwindling that might itself not be beyond
quantification) of the set of things that it is any more in principle im-
possible to count, or render as number. My concern is with the kinds
of adjustment that we, by which I mean primarily non-mathematical
persons, are having to make to this world of measurable quantities
and calculable ratios. For this reason, my aim is not to quarantine
quality from quantity, but rather to articulate some of the specific
qualities of the quantitative, some of the many and changeable ways
in which quantity comes to exercise its purchase upon us, and we
our prehensions of quantity. For this, I propose the term quantality,
with, as though that were not yet bad enough, quantical as its adjec-
tival complement, to imply the tendency or aspiration to render
things in terms of quantity. A quantitative analysis deals with known
or knowable quantities; a quantical attitude seeks to make out the
values of quantity as such. The quantical might be regarded as the
subjunctive mood of the quantitative, this slight unsteadiness of
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meaning assisted by its evocations of words like nautical and quizzical.

Quantality is the name for the apprehension of quantity in general,
before (and after) specific quantifications. Quantality is the quality
of the quantitative.
In physics, quantality refers to the quantum view of matter
opened up by Max Planck, that energy and matter at the smallest
scales are not continuous, but must jump between discrete energy
states. Even in physics, though, the word is something of an exotic.
In fact I first found it used by Oliver Sacks in his book A Leg to Stand
On (1984) to describe a distinctly exotic experience, that of having to
incorporate back into his body schema a leg that he had injured badly
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while fleeing from a bull on a Norwegian mountain. In the chapter

entitled ‘Solviter Ambulando’, Sacks describes how, following a long
convalescence, he had to try to start walking again. The experience he
evokes is rendered as the capture of the moment between the formless
and the sense of relative measure that is implicit in inhabiting a body,
or feeling some body part to be indeed part of one’s body. Sacks
experiences a chaos of sensations, but carefully insists that this is not
raw sensation so much as a kind of uncontrolled delirium of estima-
tions, or quasi-calculations, the feeling not so much of performing
calculations as of calculating going on, as he tries to get the measure
of a limb that does not yet fit into the world or his body:

As soon as the tumult of sensations and apparitions burst

forth, I had the sense of an explosion, of an absolute wild-
ness and chaos, something utterly random and anarchic at
work. But what could produce such an explosion in my
mind? Could it be a mere sensory explosion from the leg, as
it was forced to bear weight, and stand, and function, for the
first time? Surely the perceptions were too complex for this.
They had the quality of constructs, and not of raw sensations
or sense-data. They had the quality of hypotheses, of space
itself, of those elemental a priori intuitions without which
no perception, or construction of the world, would be
possible. The chaos was not of perception itself, but of
space, or measure, which precedes perception. I felt that I
was bearing witness, even as I was undergoing it, to the very
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foundations of measure, of mensuration, of a world.8

The miraculous quality for Sacks has something to do with the

eruption into consciousness of a process that had long ago been
internalized, as a result of all the many complex projections and
adjustments we must all have made as we learned to walk for the
first time:

And this perception, or pre-perception or intuition, had

nothing whatever to do with me – it was proceeding in its
own extraordinary and implacable way; which started, and
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remained, essentially random, while being modulated by

some sort of matching or testing, a targeting or guessing,
perhaps a trial-and-error process, a wonderful yet somewhat
mechanical sort of computation. I was present, it is true, but
only as an observer – a mere spectator at a primordial event,
or ‘Big Bang,’ which was the start of inner space, the micro-
cosm, in me. I was not actively, but passively, undergoing these
changes, and as such could bear witness to what it was like
to be present at the founding of a world. A true miracle was
being enacted before me, within me. Out of nothingness,
out of chaos, measure was being made. The jumping flutter-
ing metrics were converging towards some average – a proto-
scale. I felt terror, but also awe and exhilaration of spirit.
Within me there seemed to be the working of a cosmic math-
ematics, the establishment of an impersonal microcosmic
order.9

The realm of bodily measure seems to be both before the beginning

of conscious experience and just after that beginning. It makes
briefly and incandescently apprehensible, as a sort of corporeal cal-
culus, an experience that lies buried within every moment, and every
movement. Sacks looks to quantum theory for the word to describe
it – quantality:

All at once I thought of God’s questions to Job: ‘Where wast

thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Who hath laid
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the measures thereof ?’ And I thought, with awe, I am there,

I have seen it. The frames, the fluttering frames, made me
think of Planck and Einstein, and how quantality and relativity
may stem from one birth. I felt I was experiencing the ‘pre-
Planck time’ of myself – that unimaginable time cosmologists
speak of – in the first 10–45 seconds after the ‘Big Bang’ –
when space is still unstable, fluttering, quantal: that time of
preparation which precedes the beginning of real time.10

Learning to walk again, using the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto to

tone and tune his gait, helped Sacks grasp the way in which complex
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dynamic unities both forget and remember the computations of

which they are composed: ‘Here, in doing, one achieved certainty with
one swoop, by a grace which bypassed the most complex mathematics,
or, perhaps embedded, and then transcended them.’11
Sacks’s experience was a kind of visionary explicitation of the
computational nature of experience, achieved, not through con-
scious calculation, but through a kind of immediately self-sensing
coenaesthesia. But we are more than ever aware of the computed
ingredients of more and more of our apparently undecomposable
experiences. There are many more profitable things that the human-
ities might be doing than what currently absorbs their resources, on
such a prodigious scale, despite their claims to have to live like
church mice: but one of them might be to take the measure of such
movements between implicit and explicit quantality.
But we have in part to deal with the glum paradox that, as more
things become quantifiable and in an ever greater variety of ways, so
attitudes towards quantity in many quarters harden and simplify. The
more quantity might offer to lead us away from dogma, the more cal-
cified the dogmas become about what is called quantity as such. The
only quality that many of us are equipped or prepared to recognize
in quantification is that of reductiveness (we will not linger on the
fact that the idea of reductiveness can scarcely be regarded as any
kind of escape from quantitative thinking). It seems obvious to many
of us that, if you count something, you reduce its complexity to one
dimension alone, taking account only of its numerical aspect, with
everything else dropping out of consideration. But this reduction is
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by no means the end of the process. For the reduction effected by

quantification gives access to a vast multiplicity of different kinds of
mathematical relation (that, for example, of multiplication itself ),
performable on different scales and across different periodicities.
One might imagine the objection that these relations are neverthe-
less purely mathematical relations, and therefore lack the richness
and complexity of qualitative relations, between things like colours,
hopes and difficulties. But ours is a world in which the interchange
between quantities and qualitative states is richer than ever before.
We do not any more have to regard numbering as final or definitive,
a putting-to-death through exactness. Number is no longer the end
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of any story. To say that we have become more quantitative than ever
before is not to say that everything must be rendered up as number,
without remainder, and then abandoned: it is to say that number is
always in the middle of things. We have been inhabiting such a world,
in which qualities and quantities incessantly alternate with and give
rise to each other, for some time now, though we do not seem to be
as good as we might be at understanding it or its possibilities.

Digital
Of course, there can be no question that number is reductive. When
one converts something into numerical form, one imposes homo-
geneity on to heterogeneity. A digital encoding reduces what it
encodes to a sequence of alternating binaries, the simplest numeric
system that one can imagine. But having once established such a
principle of equivalence, it then becomes possible to produce varia-
tions of a much greater complexity than would be possible in any
other way. Michel Serres makes a similar observation about the
measurement of weather systems. There are, he reminds us, really
only a small number of variables of which one needs to take account
in understanding and predicting weather patterns: pressure, tem-
perature and wind speed chief among them. But variations in this
small number of parameters are all it takes to produce the almost
unfathomable complexity of the weather, of which we continue to
have only limited, local and short-range understanding.12 Reduction
to number need not mean reductiveness as such. Translating things
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into numbers or giving them number-like qualities and relations,

which essentially means dividing wholes up into smaller parts,
hugely multiplies the possibilities of what may then be done with
those wholes.
The digital revolution has amplified and itself been amplified
by a particulate awareness, an awareness that solid states of every
kind are in fact made up of molecular masses. This is not a new ap-
prehension. The earliest atomists Democritus and Leucippus postu-
lated that the atoms of which matter is composed were of every
possible size and shape, and the differences between these sizes and
shapes were what accounted for the different qualities, of sharpness,
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redness and so forth, of different kinds of matter. Lucretius gives a

memorable statement of this in De rerum naturae: ‘You may readily
infer that such substances as titillate the senses agreeably are com-
posed of smooth round atoms. Those that seem bitter and harsh are
more tightly compacted of hooked particles and accordingly tear
their way into our senses and rend our bodies by their inroads.’13 But
Epicurus, whom Lucretius follows in many respects, disagreed with
Leucippus and Democritus, in arguing that atoms were in fact iden-
tical and without qualities, meaning that the qualities apparent on
larger scales emerge only as a result of the arrangements and move-
ments of these constituent atoms rather than their intrinsic qualities.
But this implies that the difference between quantity and quality
in fact reduces to a difference between scales, the emergence of qual-
ity being the effect of a movement from one scale to another. Since
scale is itself a measure of quantity rather than of quality, quantity
intersects with and enters into quality. Quality is just quantity at low
resolution. Technologies like half-tone printing and the cinema
often bring the thresholds between perceptual scales into visibility,
through the pointillist shimmer and flicker that lets us see the
constituent ‘atoms’ of our vision.
The digital revolution is really only a prodigious acceleration of
the many forms of digitization that have been developed through
history, if by digitization we mean the decomposition of wholes into
equivalent and so exchangeable components. Bricklaying, mosaic
tiling and typesetting are all examples of digitization. It has made
clearer than ever the ways in which the decomposition of wholes into
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orderable multiplicities makes it possible to create much richer and

more complex variations and relations. If one imagines a simple
rod made of solid and impermeable matter, it would be impossible
to convert it into any other shape. Break the rod up into a number of
joints and it becomes possible to bend it into different shapes. The
more divisions one can make in the rod, the more flexible it will be.
What is more, the more exactly equivalent these divisions are, the
greater the possibility of variability in the elasticity of the rod.
But a further principle needs to be added to that of equivalence
for the rod to become maximally transformable: that of ordinality. If
the equivalent units can be ordered in a series, whether that series
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be generated by the principle of adding one unit at a time, as in

counting, or some other, more arbitrary principle of ordering, like
the alphabetic series, or even the sequence of colours in the rainbow
(which may be expressed mathematically in terms of electromagnetic
frequencies), it becomes possible not just to order, but rapidly to
reorder the series, and not just by counting through, but by the com-
bination of elements. One may think of the rod as a simple form
which is made more complex through being divided into permutable
units. Mathematizing the rod subjects its simple and absolute given-
ness to an arbitrary and external principle – no matter how small the
units, their size will have to be given by means of some principle that
is heterogeneous to the rod.
But one might also think of the rod not as something simple but
as a kind of massive chord with all its constituent elements sounding
simultaneously, but undecomposably, containing the sum of all its
possible divisions and relations. Dividing the rod up into those
elements means being able to play these simultaneous possibilities
out in time. But it also means having all the elements available as a
kind of space to be traversed. The unquantified rod is like all the
notes of the piano, and all the conceivable notes between them,
being sounded at once. The divided rod is like the keyboard, whose
potential internal relations can be actualized in temporal patterns.
Numerical relations are relations between equivalent, exchange-
able units, whether or not these consist of numbers: so in this sense
a film is already digital, because the separate frames have a numerical
relation of absolute equivalence to each other. But numerical rela-
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tions are not just exactly equivalent, but also orderable and therefore
manipulable, because ordering otherwise equivalent units puts them
into a navigable space. Numbers are atoms with names.
There are few more powerful enactments of this principle than
printing. Printing literally transformed individual characters into
separate blocks. Because these blocks were interchangeable, they
could be varied, endlessly set, broken up, cast off and redistributed.
None of the gains in reproducibility that printing offers are possible
unless the type is cast so that the characters are of an equivalent size,
which can sit next to each other in the compositor’s stick. This
converts the analogue forms of letters, based on the principle of
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continuous variation, into digital forms, made up of patterns of dis-

continuous units. But, if printing gave this principle material form,
it was only able to do it because people were already users of writing,
which involves a digitization of speech. Writing broke up continuous
events into discontinuous objects; indeed, writing made it possible
for speech to be considered as consisting of distinguishable or com-
parable forms of event, such as ejaculations or sentences. Writing
also involved deciding, for example, that the flow of speech could be
chunked into units called words, and that those words were them-
selves configurations of a small number of elements that might be
called characters or letters.
But even this digitizing decision is one which every oral language
or spoken system of communication seems already implicitly to have
taken with regard to itself. For every system of spoken language
requires shared and therefore exchangeable forms. This implies in
its turn the divisibility of speech into recognizable and repeatable
units – that are recognizable because they are repeatable. If it were
possible to use a different kind of sound to signify ‘mama’ every time
that concept needed to be signified, babies might do this; but they
have to learn that only repeatable speech-events, which is to say
digital or numeric-type speech objects or units, will work. There are
infinitely many sonic variations in language that might be deployed
to signify different meanings, but any language will make certain of
these differences salient and operative. This is made clear by the
phonemic variations between languages: in English the difference
between /l/ and /r/ is semantically significant, whereas in Japanese
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this is not a phonetic difference that makes any semantic difference.

For the units of spoken language to be meaningful it is a huge ad-
vantage for them to be equivalent and therefore exchangeable; in a
large number of English words, the sound /l/ can readily be substi-
tuted for the sound /r/. Phonemic differences are not just differences,
they are equivalent kinds of differences.
This implies that the digitizing of language is not, as our con-
ventional contrast between the analogue and the digital might imply,
the move from one principle to another, absolutely heterogeneous
one. Digital encoding is as powerful as it is because it is the extension,
or, as we might say, the inward intensification, of a principle of
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organization that is everywhere at work already in all organized

language, if not always to the same degree. And this form of organ-
ization is numeric, sharing with number the twin principles of
divisibility and orderability, which is to say compressibility. Divisi-
bility tends towards and depends on the principle of equivalence,
which makes individual units maximally interchangeable with one
another. Orderability makes variability possible, because what can
be ordered can be reordered, and to reorder is always easier than to
order the unordered: you cannot engineer water, but you can engin-
eer the compound molecules of which water consists. We can say
that these numeric systems allow for variable equivalence.
There might be other ways to produce the huge variety of forms
that physical matter can take, but it is unlikely that any arrangement
that did not involve the variable relations between equivalent units
would ever produce this variety of property and quality. There might
be another way for living creatures to have evolved the vast range of
form and function that makes up the design space of evolution, but
there seem good reasons why the permutation of just four elements
in dna coding is both necessary and sufficient for this.
The point about reducing something to number is that one is
thereby enabled to go beyond simple numbering into the prodigious
enlargement of relations that mathematics allows (and let us be as-
sured that it is only from its putative outside that mathematics seems
like only one kind of thing, math in the singular rather than plural
maths). A. N. Whitehead indicates something like this in his Religion
in the Making, in defining a dogma as ‘the precise enunciation of a
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general truth, divested so far as possible from particular exemplifi-

cation’.14 The example he gives is the notion of irrational number,
which had formed part of mathematics, albeit in rather a shadowy
way, until it was given accurate definition in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. It is possible to see such formalization as the
delimiting of possibility, but Whitehead argues, and surely rightly,
that ‘such precise expression is in the long run a condition for vivid
realization, for effectiveness, for apprehension of width of scope,
and for survival.’15

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Quits
Numbering has the reputation of making things more precise,
thereby taking away the possibility of uncertainty or mystery. But
we are wrong to see number always as the exaction of exactness. The
word precise comes from the past participle of Latin praecidere, mean-
ing to cut off: until the seventeenth century, to precide meant to
excommunicate. In its early history, precision nearly always has this
sense of the abrupt or reduced, not to say, on occasion, the homicidal.
But it was also commonly used by Protestant theologians suspicious
of overly scrupulous forms of religious observance, for whom being
‘superstitiously precise’ could be a kind of idolatry.16 Indeed, it is
for this reason that the precise could come to constitute a kind of
exhibitionist exorbitance, as in Biron’s apology in Love’s Labour’s Lost:

Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,

Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical: these summer flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.17

It is a mistake to imagine that precision will always involve the

reduction of the complex to the simple, though this may be an
important accessory principle. In fact, since the development of
statistical understandings of the process of measurement, which
emphasize the need to acknowledge the likelihood of variation,
precision has come to veer over into its opposite, meaning the
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propensity of any set of measurements to produce variant results,

that is, the amount of imprecision that may be expected of any obser-
vation or measurement. The first use of the word ‘imprecise’
recorded by the oed is as late as 1805, though a couple of examples
may be found a little earlier in an eighteenth-century book on
spelling reform.18 Francis Thompson complains in a 1907 Athenaeum
review of Henry James’s The American Scene of a Bironian excess of
precision in the work of James: ‘He must still write about and around
it, and every way but of it – must approach it by stealth and tortuous
indirectness, and deck it with the most elaborated precisions of im-
preciseness, as if it required hinting afar off.’19 Indeed, Thompson
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seems to make the Shakespearian connection explicit, groaning that

‘throughout four hundred and sixty-five broad pages there is no oasis
in the level, unbroken expanse of Jacobean style.’20
The particular topic that Thompson instances as requiring the
‘accumulation of every Jacobean resource for uttering the unutter-
able’ is that of the effect of modern mass existence: ‘He tells you
that, among the vast numbers newly cast into the machine (so to
speak), the most striking feature is their featurelessness, the dead
blank of monotonous uniformity which has resulted.’ 21 Thomp-
son’s complaint is essentially a statistical one – he would like James
to state the general truth straightforwardly and without the mincing
application of the ‘microtome’, a blade used to cut slices of matter
for microscope slides.22 Thompson wants James to go straight to
the rough-and-ready average, when the question of how that is
derived is the one that seems most absorbing. However taxing the
result, the precision of impreciseness seems, excuse me, precisely
the interesting point about James’s response to the phenomenon
of mass uniformity.
So, for example, one might say that the principle of air con-
ditioning depends upon the powerful but vague apprehension that
human beings, as creatures who have to maintain a constant body
temperature, find large variations of temperature stressful and
unpleasant, and tend to operate most successfully in a smaller rather
than a larger range of temperatures. This might lead one to the
specification of an average temperature that would conduce to
thermal comfort. However, this kind of precision only discloses the
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need for further precision, since it becomes clear that variation in

temperature is also an important feature in human well-being, in
which the principle of ‘thermal delight’, in Lisa Heschong’s superb
phrase, is paramount.23 Precision, in other words, may pass through
definition, or the reduction of variation, but does so in order to be
able to be more precise about variation itself. Precision, which begins
by being categorical, is thereby able to become circumstantial. This
is the principal reason why one cannot simply set variation against
precision, since variation enjoins precision, and precision discloses
variation much more vividly and usefully. Fuzziness is not the enemy
of precision; it is its intensification.
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This principle may be seen from reflection on the exquisite ad-

verb quite. This is one of those primary words which interested Freud,
in which the very force and reach of a word’s application mean that
it slowly spreads across into its opposite.24 Thus quite, which means
completely or entirely, is equally likely to mean almost or only to a
certain degree. When used to signal approximation, quite actually
means not quite. The difference, appropriately, is detectable in
English only by a slight phonetic modification of stress, in the differ-
ence between being quite certain and quite certain (this is a quadratic
equation, of course, since the word certain is subject to the same
fluctuation). The word quite seems to be related to the word quit,
which signals the condition of being free from a debt or obligation,
the force it has in words like acquit or requite. This might tell us that
the primary meaning of quite is actually explicable as a sort of duality,
as that which has been cleared or equalized, or reduced from some-
thing to nothing by being paid back or discounted. Quite, in fact,
requires a notion of equity, or the undoing of an iniquity: there is
always an implied doubling in being quits, so that, as Phebe notices
in As You Like It, ‘omittance is no quittance.’25 Hamlet’s quietus brings
together Latin aequus, equal and quies, repose, for, in the legal phrase
quietus est, one is made quiet by having one’s obligations discharged
or requited.
This history seems to scurry in the opening words of Beckett’s
Malone Dies: ‘I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all,’ trans-
lating ‘Je serai quand même bientôt tout à fait mort enfin’ in his
French original, or perhaps not quite translating it, since the ‘quite
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dead’ seems not quite as definitive as the briskly done-and-dusted

‘tout à fait’.26 Garrett Stewart sees in the ‘mortally mincing “quite” a
preposterous adverbial modification’ which carries Beckett’s ‘sar-
donic nostalgia for the death scene itself as closural satisfaction’.27
In a sense, the English goes further than the French, precisely by not
going quite so far as to say ‘tout à fait mort’. The absurdity of speci-
fying that one might need to be accounted quite dead lies in its allow-
ing for the idea that one might otherwise only be quite dead, like
being a touch pregnant, or somewhat unborn (even though one can
in fact be said to be dead on the whole, and perhaps, remembering
all those microbes, can only ever be). The quasi-quantitative question
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of the equivalence of translation, or, at least, its adequacy (the

adequate being that which moves towards, but does not quite reach
equivalence), here rhymes with the difficulty of knowing when or
whether one is fully dead. The English translation has to know that
its original has already been laid to rest, even as the very existence of
a translation testifies to a grimly disquieting resurrection. If a trans-
lation has always to count its original as one, rather than as a process
of accounting or recounting that might still be going on, it must
always also make one wonder if complete death, or the death of com-
pletion, is in fact to be counted on, or can ever constitute enough to
be counted as ‘one’.
The fact that quietness and quitting are proximal in the word
quite means that it is often brought into question in the writing of
death, since writing both is and is not quite death itself, being both
the death and the preservation of living speech. Shakespeare’s
Sonnet 126 evokes the ‘lovely boy’ who both grows and yet is held
back by a Nature seemingly intent on the ‘disgrace’ of time. But like
the poem, which, in explicating that borrowing of time or holding
back from time must also imitate it, Nature must in the end render
up its account:

She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure!

Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.28

The double-entry of the final couplet not only balances debt with the
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quittance of death, but makes them equivalent to the question-and-

answer duet of audibility and making quiet. The word quiet has some-
times provoked reflection on the particular kind of hushing sound
it makes, especially in the suggestion that quietus might sound like
the last breath, as in Keats’s invitation to Death to ‘take into the air
my quiet breath’, a line cruelly recalled as Belacqua watches a lobster
about to be plunged into boiling water in Beckett’s ‘Dante and the
Lobster’.29 Emily Dickinson also seems to imbricate quietness with
the mortal quietness of that which continues on paper to be able to
simulate the airy not-quite-nothing of life:

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I breathed enough to take the Trick –

And now, removed from Air –
I simulate the Breath, so well –
That One, to be quite sure –

The Lungs are stirless – must descend

Among the Cunning Cells –
And touch the Pantomime – Himself,
How numb, the Bellows feels!30

The quality of all these qualifications that the equivocal quite permits
and prompts is nothing if it is not quantical, which is to say, not quite
quantitative, yet certainly not quite not either.

Spelling Out
Peter Sloterdijk has argued that modernity, by which he might perhaps
mean Dasein itself, insofar as it conceives and thereby produces itself
as historical, is itself made intelligible through a process that he calls
explizieren, explicitation. Indeed, we may see Sloterdijk’s own distin-
guishing of the process of explicitation as an example of the process:
the concept of explicitation is an explicitation of its own function.
Explicitation is what might be called ‘spelling things out’, or showing
the workings in detail of something.31 Perhaps we might sum up the
process of making the latent manifest with the word intelligence – which
signifies both the capacity to understand and the process of commu-
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nicating that understanding. Intelligence, as a kind of making known,

will always involve telling, in two senses: the counting out involved in
Fairfax’s talecraft, and the articulation of that counting. If explizieren is
the move from inherence to intelligence, it is a version of the view, regu-
larly articulated by Michel Serres, that nature moves from ‘hard’ form
to ‘soft’ information.32 The implicit can never be made explicit except
through greater precision, and that precision must almost always
involve the move from quality to quantity. ‘I am almosting it,’ thinks
Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus to himself.33 Is that quality or quantity?
Sloterdijk sees explicitation as always going in two directions at
once. As unfolding, it is part of the ‘exodus of humans into the
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open’,34 the movement outwards from the primal bubbles of co-

belonging, of actual and imaginary enclosure, taking as their model
the baby in the womb, in which human individuals and collectivities
house themselves. It is a movement into number because number is
one of the forces that rupture this primal bubble:

The biune world had known neither number nor resistance,

for even the mere awareness that there were other things,
countable and third options, would have corrupted the
initial homeostasis. The expulsion from paradise means the
fall from the blissful inability to count. In the dyad, the
united two even have the power to deny their twoness in uni-
son: in their breathed retreat they form an alliance against
numbers and interstices. Secundum, tertium, quartum, quintum
– non dantur.35

But number as exteriority is folded back, Sloterdijk maintains, into

a second, immunological skin, to contain its very exilic threat and
protect against the ‘cosmic frost’.36 One form of this immune system,
patching up the ontological rent produced by number, shaping a
shelter from the very landscape of one’s exposure, is mathematics.
In the great, and late, unfolding of mathematics that has taken
place over the last millennium, and especially in the last 400 years,
the realm of number seemed gradually to be making itself autono-
mous of the realm of signs, written and visual. But the apogee of this
autonomy, the point at which the orbit of mathematics took it
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furthest away from the earth, the moment of what Jeremy Gray has
called the ‘modernist transformation of mathematics’, was also the
point at which number was about to begin its great re-entry into
earthly (that is, social, psychological, emotional, financial, technical)
life.37 As A. N. Whitehead remarks in his Science and the Modern World,
‘nothing is more impressive than the fact that as mathematics with-
drew increasingly into the upper regions of ever greater extremes of
abstract thought, it returned back to earth with a corresponding
growth of importance for the analysis of concrete fact.’38 From this
position, the lifeworld was infected and inflected by number, even
as the very notion of the lifeworld, as a fragile and separated enclave,
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was more and more an effect of this panicky detraction from number,
or the effort to quarantine number from life experience. Though pure
or formal mathematics will doubtless continue to become even more
forbidding in its complexity and, for that reason, seemingly ever
more forbidden to most people, our lives (including, of course, the
lives of mathematicians when they are waiting for buses, planting
gardens, contributing to pensions, waiting for aeroplanes or fleeing
airstrikes) have in fact become ever more densely impregnated by
number, and not just in the way suggested contemptuously by Alain
Badiou, who believes we are subject to the debased and debasing
forms of ‘number’s despotism’, in shopping, elections and cup
finals, in which ‘what counts – in the sense of what is valued – is that
which is counted.’39 In recasting social and mental life, number has
broken free from mathematical reasoning, not least in being auto-
mated through digital and mechanical means. Computing technol-
ogy has not so much alienated us from number as emancipated
number from the operations of mind, allowing it to enter more
generously and generatively than ever before into different sorts of
experience. This does not mean that our lives are governed by num-
ber in any simple or asymmetrical sense, but rather that numbers
and signs are becoming reciprocally formative and illuminating. I
have said that number is the direction in which nature moves – but
in fact that movement is not all in the same direction. The move from
matter to number, from form to information, is not a steadily rolling
river, but tidal, nebular, vortical, polyvectorial.
The most striking manifestation of the compounding under-
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gone and effected by number is the explosion of code, which stands

between the conditions of word and number, giving number mean-
ing and performative power, and giving signs (not just verbal signs
– think of a barcode) the powers of number. Number no longer lies
at the beginning of things, as the Pythagorean primordial principle
of the universe, nor at the end of a process in which the numerical
laws of nature will have been fully explicated. Number lies in the
middle, and has itself grown to be the most energetic mediator of
all. We move in and out of number and thereby move number into
and back out of explicitness. Before digital encoding – or, to be more
precise, before automated digital encoding – number was usually an
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unfolding of the enfolded, in the specification of the hitherto unregis-

tered, even unsuspected quantities, dimensions, weights, distances,
magnitudes, rates and ratios of things. But digital encoding can now
enfold as well as unfold, implying prodigious numbers of numerical
relations that are no more capable of being registered directly by con-
sciousness than the individual vibrations of musical notes. This kind
of encoding does not lead to number as its end point, but employs
number as the mediation between sign and sign. We are familiar
enough with transformations of numbers into words, as when we
explicate what some piece of mathematical notation means, or of
words into numbers, as when a set of variant conditions are sum-
marized in some mathematical formula. But we also use numbers
to multiply and accelerate the relations between verbal signs, as
when I respond to an email, or speak to somebody on the telephone;
and can also, though perhaps less often, use words or other verbal
signs to multiply or accelerate the relations between numbers.
Numbers and signs both translate and potentiate each other. To
translate a sign or sequence of signs into digital form is not to fix
it, but to mobilize or virtualize it, to allow for translations and
transformations that are otherwise unlikely, expensive or impossible.
My focus in this book is on the raw idea of numbers rather than
mathematics. Following Christopher Small, musical theorists of an
anthropological kind like to use the word ‘musicking’ to refer to the
social practices and contexts of music-making in general, as
opposed to the specialized skills of musical composition and per-
formance.40 The horizon of social quantality within which I propose
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to move might suggest an equivalent term like ‘numerizing’ to evoke

the inexpert but raggedly resourceful variety of habits, actions and
sentiments associated with the workings of number.
How can the humanities, as distinct from humans, benefit from
this perspective? Perhaps they are not going to be able to and, if not,
then so much the worse for the humanities. For, whatever the hu-
manities elect or neglect to do, humans are going to continue to
enter more variously and energetically than ever into number. But if
the humanities are to get any benefit, a prerequisite is that they have
to find a way to be interested in the topic, which would mean giving
up the hysterical institutional allergy to number and all the inhuman,
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morbid powers it is held to embody. We would have to substitute

curiosity for complacent phobia, and would have to want to be
intelligent about the particular kinds of intelligibility that number
conducts. As the name might suggest (though rather too presump-
tuously for my taste), the humanities have something to do with
the human. But we may take a chilly sort of cheer from the curiously
and comfortably plural–singular name of ‘the humanities’, hoping
that, in the uncertainty of its number, the humanities may start to
resemble the thing, or the many things, known as mathematics.
Many of those in the humanities are appalled by the incursions of
the quantitative sciences into more and more areas of human life,
principally through economics; indeed, many of those in the
humanities take their vocation and make a profession from this de-
nunciation of the quantitative. But the reason that the quantitative
sciences have extended their reach is that they have multiplied their
forms and their ways of having significance. The mathematics from
which so many humanists spiritually and professionally recoil
(except perhaps when adding up their expense claims) is a paltry
thing compared with the kinds of mathematics that are beginning
to be deployed in so many areas of life, many of them areas that one
would think would be of importance for the humanities. This is a
mathematics that is not just declarative, as Michel Serres has put it,
but procedural. Rather than being concerned with the production
of general models or formulae, or closing accounts, mathematics
is becoming ever more implicated in the operation of functions or
procedures. Declarative knowledge is customarily defined as know-
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ledge that (knowledge that there are twelve inches in a foot, that
Paris is the capital of France, and so on), while procedural know-
ledge is the knowledge of how to do something, such as ride a bicycle.
Serres sets out the difference:

The declarative or conceptual invents ideas, defining them

distinctly, follows the principle of reason in its fixed form,
following out causes and effects in detail. The algorithmic
or procedural constructs events and singularities step by step,
entering into details, in a series of times and circumstances.

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The declarative demonstrates, abstractly. The procedural

relates, individually.41

The difference between the declarative and the procedural is a quan-

titative difference between the different speeds at which a volume of
data may be traversed:

The algorithmic mode is made possible primarily by

computing and other automated procedures, which mean
that ‘the old image of light changes from clarity to speed’ . . .
To comprehend thousands of examples, we have less need
of the concept . . . Inscribed in the machine, a thousand
algorithmic procedures allow the construction and direct
envisaging in rich detail of singularities which are no longer
smoothed out.42

This book is not directly about mathematics. It is most certainly not

a philosophy of mathematics. Rather, it is concerned with what hap-
pens in the course of this process in which things are brought into
the condition of number, with the oscillations between the being and
the doing of number, the oscillation between being and doing what
number is, the oscillation between being and doing that number is.
It looks to a condition in which the arts, sciences and other areas of
human existence are beginning to converge in a single, though
hugely diverse, operation of practical judgement in which all the
different forms of calculation cohere, and in which what used to be
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known so uselessly as interpretation has acquired the new, fair name

of engineering.
Not only are the humanities certain to be bound up in number
more variously than ever before, if they are to continue to be part of
serious intellectual endeavour and not to dwindle into the condition
of an indulgently licensed cult, like aromatherapy on the National
Health; a steady and serious engagement with number will disclose
that the important questions in art and experience have in fact always
vibrated with quantical questions: that is, with magnitude, scale,
dimension, extent, frequency and duration, along with the acts of
measurement whereby we adjust ourselves to them. If there is
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anything that is truly unextended, it takes its measure always from

the res extensa. The concern with the nature of personal and cultural
identity which has been such an obsession across the humanities is,
in principle and action, a reflection on what William James desig-
nates as ‘the abstract numerical principle of identity, this “Number
One” within me, for which, according to proverbial philosophy, I
am supposed to keep so constant a “lookout”’.43 The bad reputation
that number has gained has to do with the fact that we are so in-
vested in keeping ourselves whole and entire (that is the mathem-
atical meaning of the word health). Human fiendishness seems
drawn to mathematics, as in ordeals like being hanged, drawn and
quartered, in which the horror of being turned from a complete
thing into a series of fractions (as we do to meat) is indulged. The
particular cruelty of this punishment consists in the almost comic
incongruence between its exact apportioning and its absurd exces-
siveness, as well as with its duodecimal compounding of multipli-
cation (or division) by three (hanging, drawing, quartering) and by
four. To reduce a living body to matter by this method is a sign of
the unnaturalness of number, but the quality of the unnaturalness,
its mixture of horror, relish and mock-coldness, can be nothing
other than human, for only a creature saturated in number could be
so attuned to its quantitative qualities.
We need only look at the proliferation of particles like poly- and
multi- in cultural criticism, or the Deleuzian thematics of the molar
and the molecular, or the recent prestige gathered by the idea of
the ‘multitude’ over the ‘mass’ (considered in Chapter Five), to
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see the signs of this suppressed intuition that the questions that
have the most import and longevity in the humanities are numerical
ones. No conception of the sublime has ever been formed otherwise
than in geometrical or quantitative terms of ratio and proportion.
Whether it is a matter of meaning, feeling or form, questions of
number, quantity, magnitude and measure always assert their force,
albeit in dim and groping ways. Quantality is to the quantitative as
algebra is to arithmetic, or as topology is to geometry, for it is
concerned with ratios and not absolute quantities.
Perhaps there is a sense in which the role of the humanities may
continue to be phenomenological, in the fundamental sense in
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which that strain of philosophy has concerned itself not with how
things are, but what it is like that they should be that way. A quantical
humanities might, as a modest sort of minimum, be concerned with
the tonalities of the quantitative. There is no writer who has pene-
trated further into this enterprise than Sigmund Freud, for whom
human drives and feelings were not just illuminated by the kinds of
quantality he called the economic, but were entirely unintelligible
without it.
Freud is very rarely mentioned in the work of Michel Serres, but
he does make a telling appearance in the course of the essay ‘The
Origin of Language’. The essay announces a unification of biology
and psychology through the information theory announced in
Claude Shannon’s ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’.44
Central to Serres’ account is the suggestion of a system formed of
many levels of integration, in which the coupling of noise and infor-
mation at one level is integrated into information at the next level up,
a process which is describable in the same terms whether one is
talking about a cluster of neurons, a cell or a sentence. It is a process
in which addition allows subtraction: adding noise creates con-
tradiction, but seeing that contradiction as ambiguity allows for
integration, or the subtraction of noise, at a higher level. Sloterdijk’s
immunology is perhaps a translation of the very same process of
turning noise into information. Serres suggests that this Russian
doll model is a significant advance on the Freudian ‘mechanical or
hydrodynamic model’,45 since it allows us to see the unconscious not
as a single, turbid reservoir, but rather as an interlocking chain of
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systems, in which noise at one level is apprehended as information

at the next level up:

At this point the unconscious gives way from below; there

are as many unconsciouses in the system as there are inte-
gration levels. It is merely a question, in general, of that for
which we initially possess no information. It is not a unique
black box, but a series of interlocking boxes; and this series
is the organism, the body. Each level of information func-
tions as an unconscious for the global level bordering it, as
a closed or relatively isolated system in relationship to
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which the noise–information couple, when it crosses the

edge, is reversed and which the subsequent system decodes
or deciphers.46

Information theory provides a way of treating what Serres calls ‘the

energy account’ (the mathematics of thermodynamics, or physical
systems in general) and the ‘information account’ (the mathematics
of signals or communication systems communication) as commen-
surable; they are not on the same scale, but they are of the same order,
and therefore capable of being brought into relation.

The difference between a machine and a living organism is

that, for the former, the information account is negligible in
relationship to the energy account, whereas, for the latter,
both accounts are on the same scale. Henceforth, the
theoretical reconciliation between information theory and
thermodynamics favors and advocates the practical recon-
ciliation between those funds of knowledge which exploited
signs and those which exploited energy displacements.47

And, seemingly having left Freud’s wheezing, Heath Robinson

hydrodynamics behind, Serres suddenly acknowledges that this
reconciliation of the energy and information accounts ‘was Freud’s
first dream’.48 In truth, this particular dream was in fact first and last
for Freud, since everything became for him an economic problem. If
the early Freud wanted to build a psychophysics of the self, which
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would translate psychology into measurements of quantity, the Freud

of Beyond the Pleasure Principle onwards saw this kind of economic
endeavour, working in the form of a virtual or performative math-
ematics, as the very engine of psychological life. Mathematics was
not just something in terms of which psychological life could be ren-
dered; it was what it was made of, what it made of itself, in the first
place. Freud’s theory of the death drive, in its entwining with the
erotic or pleasure principle, is not just accidentally but essentially a
calculus of thanato-erotic variation and substitution, which is not
just expressible as quantitative terms, but brought into being as im-
passioned quantality. The symbolic relation in which one thing is
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brought or forced more or less comfortably into correspondence

with another is essentially a matter of equivalence or excess, which
is to say of measure. This brings psychoanalysis into accord with
aesthetics as an interpretative operation.
Freud’s work intimates that, if there is the possibility of putting
psychodynamics together in the same scale as thermodynamics, then
that will formalize a relationship that has been elaborated for cen-
turies in the workings of fantasy calculations and the calculations of
fantasy. Revenge and reparation are nothing without the imagination
of quantity, and the quantality of imagination, and probably little
else beside them. None of our dreams of justice and fairness have
any purchase without the aligning and allotting of weights and meas-
ures. In fact, the entire teeming universe of qualities is shaped and
expressed through scale and extent, ratio and equivalence. Wanting,
losing, hating, hurting, enjoying, striving, suffering, knowing,
mourning, seeing and saying, all are shaped and suffused by the
psychotropic pressure of number. The whole spectrum of affects
associated with temporality, its protentions and retentions, its reach-
ings, longings and lastings, is toned and braced through the work
of imaginary measure. Chapter Six will show that pleasure itself is
not only subject to what Jeremy Bentham called a felicific calculus,
but is in itself the application of that calculus. It would be tempting
to say that the humanities inhabit the domain of the approximate or
imaginary as opposed to what are called the exact sciences, were it
not that the idea of exactitude itself is so gravid with quantical fantasy
(as is the idea of fantasy). The quantical imagination is a subrealm
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of the material imagination, and is subject to the reversibility of

that phrase; that is, just as the material imagination is both the way
in which the idea of matter is imagined, and also the imaginary
materialization of the faculty of imagination itself, so the quantical
imagination is both the way we dream quantity and the quantical ac-
count we keep of our dreamwork. This is double-entry bookkeeping
indeed.
We keep ourselves stubbornly and stupidly in the dark about our
deep investment, as humanists and humans, in quantality, stum-
bling about in blind man’s buff amid the blaze of noon. If number
is part of the process of making explicit, then showing the workings
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of number in our own rhetorics and forms of cognitive and affective

calculus ought to be a more absorbing and impelling task for us all.
If we continue to self-medicate with the narcotic conviction that the
most essential things we do as humans have nothing to do with
number, we not only fail to recognize our best and probably our only
prospect for continuing to do valuable things, but reveal that we
actually quite literally have no idea what we are doing, for we are all
already doing number as much as being it. Undoubtedly, we live in
number and also between the implicit and explicit conditions of
number. If they are to be good for anything, the humanities must
shape up to what I have called quantality – the quality of quantity
or the feel for figures – the agitated, affective, philosophical and
political imaginary of number.
But taking account of the feeling for number must not bypass
the most intense feeling of all provoked by number, namely that of
horror.
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Hor ror of Num be r

Flat
Mathematicians like to refer to certain problems of wide implication
as ‘deep’. It is a quaint word that is rarely heard in other areas, where
it has a hint of unearned portentousness. But, of all areas of intel-
lectual activity, mathematics is surely least of all to be characterized
in this way. Numbers, the principal constituents of mathematics, are
shallow – or, rather, they are absolutely without differentiation as
regards their depth.
The curious thing about this flatness is that it is easily and uni-
versally apparent, yet almost everywhere resisted. Few people are
actually able to bring to bear on numbers the equanimity they appear
to enjoin. Most people have favourite numbers towards which they
lean. Even if one is indifferent towards numbers, with no preference
even for odd over even, the necessary prominence in our lives of cer-
tain numbers, the bus I take to work (91), my house-number at
school (Middleton b 29), my employee number (355), my pin (1365),
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my date of birth, my invariant height and variable weight, seem to

light up certain parts of the number line with significance.
Yet there is something unreadable about numbers, if by reading
we mean an action of the mind that takes us from something manifest
to something else that it indicates or implies, something in whose
place it stands. The unreadability of numbers may be intimated by
the word ‘decipher’, for a cipher was originally the name for zero,
that number that is not quite one, that yields the name of the unread-
ability of numbers. Indecipherability seems to signify the particular
kind of illegibility that attaches to numbers, that may endlessly be
manipulated and moved around, but can never be penetrated.
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Though they may denote or measure values, numbers do not

have them, or rather they all have precisely the same value, the value
of marking some quantity. Qualities are not interchangeable, though
they are linked together by relations. Numbers are their relation and
nothing more. It is for this reason that Richard Rorty has recom-
mended thinking about numbers as a way to prise ourselves away
from the seductions and consolations of essentialist habits of
thought. The ‘panrelationalism’ that he advocates ‘is summed up in
the suggestion that we think of everything as if it were a number’.1
Numbers are very hard to think of as having ‘an essential core sur-
rounded by a penumbra of accidental relationships’.2 The essential
principle of the number seventeen, say, which happens to be my
favourite number, is that it can only be defined relationally. What is
more, there are a literally infinite number of ways in which the num-
ber seventeen can be defined – as the square root of 289, as the sum
of five and twelve, the result of subtracting 5,876 from 5,893 – none
of which has any priority over any of the others. A number is nothing
more than the sum total, the unsummable total, of all its relations
to all the other numbers there might be. For any number, there is no
number to which it will not have some relation, and no relation to
any number that is more important or intrinsic than any other. Rorty
concludes that

whatever sorts of things may have intrinsic natures, numbers

do not . . . it simply does not pay to be an essentialist about
numbers. We antiessentialists would like to convince you that
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it also does not pay to be essentialist about tables, stars, elec-

trons, human beings, academic disciplines, social institu-
tions, or anything else. We suggest that you think of all such
objects as resembling numbers in the following respect;
there is nothing to be known about them except an initially
large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other
objects. Everything that can serve as the term of a relation can
be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on forever.
There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way
up, and all the way out in every direction; you never reach
something which is not just one more nexus of relations.3
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 horror of number

Numbers do not have values, because they are the measure of

them. Titian’s Diana and Actaeon is worth £50 million – but what is
‘50 million’ worth? The value of something is that to which it is
equivalent, something else into which it may be translated or for
which, under certain circumstances, it might be exchanged. This
might indeed look like a kind of mathematical operation. Verily, the
value of 17 is expressible as the ‘something else’ of 12 + 5 or 11 + 6.
But there really is no else or other in this case, as there is in the case
of the price attached to a Titian painting, and for what seems for a
moment to be a surprising reason. A Titian can be worth £50 million
precisely because a Titian is not £50 million, precisely because it can
never be fully exchangeable with it. To be sure, I can purchase the
Titian for £50 million, but that exchange is not the same as full
equivalence, for the previous owner of the Titian cannot treat the
£50 million cheque in the same way as the Titian (and if he could the
situation would be absurd, since it would amount to exchanging a
Titian for another Titian that was identical in every conceivable way,
that is, exchanging it for itself ). So there can be exchange only where
there is non-identity. But this is not the case with the 12 + 5 or 11 + 6
and so infinitely on that constitute 17, precisely because they consti-
tute it. Seventeen is not worth 12 + 5, because it is nothing but or other
than the fact of its being 12 + 5. The alternative expressions for 17 are
precisely its identity, even if it is an identity that can never fully be
specified, not something that stands in place of that identity. Here,
in other words, one really does exchange something for itself, and
precisely because it is nothing other than the fact of this exchange-
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ability, and the sum total of all the possible exchanges that will add
up to, or subtract down to it.
What is more, there is absolutely no reason to prefer any of these
ways of making up 17 to any other. Any one will do just as well as any
other for the job of defining 17. This might seem odd in the case of
17, in particular, the seventh prime you get to when you count from
2 upwards. To discover that 17 is a prime is to discover another kind
of equivalence for it than the 1 + 16 and the 2 + 15 kind, and the pres-
tige of primes makes it seem as though this is a more important and
essential thing about 17 than the numbers of which it is made. In
fact 17 is one of only 5 known Fermat primes. A Fermat number is a
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number such that Fn = 2(2n) + 1; 17 is the Fermat number derived from

2. But though these are properties that seem to render it unique, this
is not to say any more than that we can pick it out for attention in
certain ways, and this is equivalently true for all numbers. Because
all numbers are definable in an infinite number of ways, the things
that seem to make certain numbers special are just selections from
that infinite number of ways. It may seem impressive and mysterious
that certain numbers seem to have rare or unique properties, but in
fact every number has at least one absolutely unique property – in
that it comes between two other numbers in the counting continuum.
Every number is generically unique, which means that no number is
unique in being unique. Uniqueness is what makes numbers so
monotonously uniform, not what rescues them from that uniformity.
There is no such thing as an uninteresting number, and if there were
this would make it interesting in itself.
Picking out certain numbers for special attention is the trad-
itional way of redeeming numbers for human life, because it skews
and bunches a system of absolute equivalence into one of differential
values, creating a lumpy, striated landscape out of one that is other-
wise sleekly, bleakly uniform. Magic numbers, or lucky numbers,
suggest that, far from being homogeneous and indifferent, certain
numbers do in fact have special qualities or powers – the rule of three,
the seventh son of a seventh son, unlucky thirteen and so on. The
study of numbers in literature has often depended on this kind of
numerological magic. Mathematicians are, perhaps surprisingly,
rather drawn to the same kind of mystical or magical properties of
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numbers – it is as though astronomers were to be drawn to the

claims of astrology. One might even say that, in a certain sense,
mathematics is a kind of superstitious resistance to the indifference
of numbers. A story told by the mathematician G. H. Hardy may bear
this out. Hardy had become the patron of the brilliant, self-taught
Tamil mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, whom he helped to
bring to England, where he was elected a Fellow of Trinity. This is
the account given by C. P. Snow in his foreword to Hardy’s A Mathem-
atician’s Apology of a visit paid to Ramanujan when the latter was
dying in hospital in Putney in 1920:

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Hardy, always inept about introducing a conversation, said,

‘I thought the number of my taxi-cab was 1729. It seemed to
me rather a dull number.’ To which Ramanujan replied: ‘No
Hardy! No Hardy! It is a very interesting number. It is the
smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two
different ways’ [13 + 123 or 93 + 103].4

But it may be that it is precisely as the principle of differentiated

indifference (numbers are all different from each other in exactly the
same ways) that numbers might have the force they do, and this is
why my focus in this book is on numbers rather than mathematics.
For number is the matter rather than the form of mathematics, and
mathematics may be the superstitious deterrence of number. Num-
bers are what mathematics works on, what it is necessary for there
to be in order for mathematical operations to take place. This is per-
haps the reason why a purely mathematical definition of number has
been so difficult to come up with. Because mathematics thinks with
numbers, because it is, precisely, numerical thinking, it has been
hard for mathematics, on its own, to think about number. In this
sense, although mathematics is made of number, and works in and
through it, it is fundamentally opposed to it, precisely because it is
the redemption of number. Mathematics, and especially that branch
of it known as number theory, seems to show that numbers are not
just numbers – that they are tied together by hidden webs of relation-
ship and entailment. By being mathematical, we learn to overlook
the most important and defining features of number, namely its flat
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indifference. It is this feature of number which Lewis Carroll’s Red

Queen discloses:

‘Can you do Addition?’ the White Queen asked. ‘What’s one

and one and one and one and one and one and one and one
and one and one?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Alice. ‘I lost count.’
‘She ca’n’t do Addition,’ the Red Queen interrupted.5

‘Doing addition’ means being able to process a stream of identical

ones into consecutive products, using the embodied adding machine
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known as counting. This simple action, which seems elementary, is

in fact a way of providing orientation, or converting the shallowness
of number into a kind of depth. Counting is a way of not ‘losing
count’ amid the swirl of raw numbers.
To be a living entity is to have some kind of here and now, to
occupy some particular portion of time and space that can never be
merely equivalent to some other portion of time and space. What we
call life is perhaps no more or less than this quality of thisness, or
itselfness. It is this thisness that number disperses, flattening it out
into equivalence. Number gives control, because number requires
and supplies distinctness, the possibility of series and finitude
(distinguishability and countability). But it does so at the cost of the
drastically asymmetrical, nonreversible world in which my meaning
and value is never simply commutable into yours or hers. This ab-
solute equivalence is what I will call death: death, not as nonbeing,
but as absolute equivalence, the absence of any difference that would
make any real difference between one mode of being and another.
Number is always laying siege to its own numerousness. Numerals
fight against the numerous, numbering being an attempt to steady
and segment the dizzy delirium of one-after-another, or the one-
beside-another, the one-and-another-one-just-like-it. Death is what
happens to the one, that which cannot be experienced by anyone else,
any other one. As such, death is finitude, the necessity of a limit to
being, a limit that allows that being to amount to a singular entity
precisely by being cut short. Ultimately, number is death, death being
what comes when your number is up. One’s death can only ever
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happen once, and cannot ever be rehearsed or repeated, since it

brings to an end the time in which anticipation or retrospection
might occur. And yet, it is not one’s death that is unique, one’s own-
most, in Heidegger’s terms, but one’s being-towards-death, or dying
into death. Death is in fact always the swallowing of the singular by
the multiple, the process by which a unique person concurs with the
general ‘one’ of ‘one dies.’ It is the necessary finitude that gives us
our oneness, but that also makes us non-finitely equivalent to every
other one who has been born and died.
The horror of number is that any and every number can be
counted out as a succession of ones, added to each other (including,
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of course, decimals and fractions). The units that make up a number

are absolutely interchangeable; no one differs in any respect from
any other one. And yet those ones are not the same, because they can
be added to each other. Counting is a matter of one, then another
one, exactly the same, and another one. It is a horror, because it is a
vision of indifference – of an absolute differentiation, which makes
or is founded on no difference at all, with the number line being a
distension of identicality. Indeed, there is evidence that we will not
allow ourselves to believe what we claim to know, namely, that the
one that is added to eleven to make twelve is the same as the one
added to two to make three. Because it is somehow further away,
it seems to many that it must be smaller, because distant objects
appear smaller than proximate ones.6 Appalled by the prospect of a
flat world that need take no account of the difference we make to it,
we tug it into perspective.

Hickory Dickory Dock

There is a tension between numerality and numerology; that is, there
is always a tension between the fact that numbers do not and cannot
mean anything in themselves, since all numbers must be absolutely
equivalent, and the effort to give significance to number. This is no
mere philosophical alternation between abstract alternatives. The
tension involved is something like that described by Frank Kermode
when he points to the inaudibility of ‘tick tick’, and the need for
human beings to give scansion to their experience of time, through
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transforming the identical series of ticks into the alternating pattern

of ‘tick-tock’. The sing-song of the tick-tock is a model, says
Kermode, of the ways in which we transform the simple one-thing-
after-another seriality of abstract time into the meaningful sequences
of narrative.

Tick is a humble genesis, tock a feeble apocalypse; and tick-

tock is in any case not much of a plot. We need much larger
ones and much more complicated ones if we persist in find-
ing ‘what will suffice . . .’ Within this organization that
which was conceived of as simply successive becomes
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charged with past and future: what was chronos becomes

kairos. This is the time of the novelist, a transformation of
mere successiveness which has been likened, by writers as
different as Forster and Musil, to the experience of love, the
erotic consciousness which makes divinely satisfactory
sense out of the commonplace person.7

So the tension between chronos and kairos is in fact the tension

between tension itself and – we seem tellingly not to have a word for
this, or not much of one – the untense or the tenseless. Jean-François
Lyotard provides a version of this kind of thinking in opposing what
he calls the principle of the ‘tensor’ to a merely semiotic view of signs.
The semiotic view considers only relations of equivalence or substi-
tutability between signs, and thus leads to a kind of nihilistic despair,
since one will never escape from the play of substitutions. Lyotard
accuses semiotics of maintaining a kind of negative economy upon
the fact of this lack, which he calls ‘the zero of book-keeping’.8
Against this, the tensor of the sign is thought of as the pure move-
ment of energy, or energy of movement. The tensor is the energy that
moves us through and across signs, rather than the attempt to sum
or substitute them. In classical Greek, kairos means, not so much a
different quality of time, but rather the moment of choice or crisis,
which is the moment at which time seems to be gathered into signifi-
cance. Typically events such as Christian revelation are taken to be the
irruption of kairos into the neutral and featureless tick-tick of chronos
or merely serial experience (though it is hard to see how there could
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even be anything like an experience of time as pure seriality).

Very often, almost always perhaps, numerology is involved in
this move from chronos to kairos. Temporal significance is estab-
lished through counting: the countdown to lift-off, the third day, the
seventh wave, the millennium. Counting is a reliable and versatile
method for achieving orgasm, through the countdown, or in the
more mundane version which a tidy-minded girlfriend of my ac-
quaintance once imparted to me, through the mounting consum-
mation of black refuse bags being taken out of the house to the bin.
Counting allows us to mark out differences of beat or emphasis; it
gives time to prosody by bending it to the force of desire. It locates
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us in time, making it possible for there to be what we call lived time,

by which it seems we must mean regularly interrupted time, time
that keeps pausing and resuming, stepping aside from itself, rather
than just keeping on keeping on. Numbering is the gateway to this
defeat or redemption of pure numerality.
Kairos is associated with revelation, with the suspension of the
mundane in favour of the spiritual, or what some contemporary
philosophers like thrillingly to call ‘the event’. Most theories of
revolution borrow from the logic of kairos, in which time is to be re-
deemed from mere succession. Kairos is thought of as mysterious
and fugitive, while the experience of chronos is everywhere. It is, in
Kermode’s words, ‘the interval [that] must be purged of simple
chronicity’.9 (My spellchecker seems to be in league with this mode
of thought, for it keeps spontaneously capitalizing kairos as Kairos,
while it leaves chronos alone.) But what should be most striking
about Kermode’s tick-tock principle is that it shows us that it is the
experience of kairos that is ordinary and everyday and the experience
of chronos that is consequently in need of revelation, precisely
because it is so very difficult for us to have any kind of extended
experience of the tick-tick that does not start organizing it into
sequences. It is not the fact that the organizational structures of The
Divine Comedy or War and Peace or A la recherche du temps perdu rescue us
from the drab vacuity of the tick-tock that should strike us, but the
fact that there is ‘humble genesis’ and ‘feeble apocalypse’ even in the
tick-tock, that is, right down at the atomic level of our experience of
time. The ordinal aspect of numerality, the fact that numbers form
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an order, is recruited against the cardinal principle of equivalence,

the fact that, in order for there to be any meaningful order, each suc-
cessive number must have exactly the same quality as its predecessor.
Ordinality, precisely because it allows for summing and patterning,
along with all the apparatus of mathematical thought, is always close
to numerology, the magical clumping of differential significance.
These considerations are dramatized in the Marquis de Sade’s
120 Days of Sodom, which offers us a grim, ludicrous accountancy of
excess, in which the accountancy is both necessary to the excess and
ultimately its antagonist. Not only is the work as a whole constructed
in the traditional mode of the story-cycle – the 1001 Nights, the
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Decameron; indeed, the 120 Days seems to be asking to be read as a

Boccaccian Dodecameron – its narrative is driven throughout by math-
ematical procedures. The prominence of number means that the
imperious desire for more perversity, which number aims to enforce
and augment, always teeters on the brink of tedium and hilarity.10
The horror at work in the force of numerality may appear as the
inhuman, that which makes human life impossible, or at least
unbearable. But in fact, there is nothing more human than this in-
human principle of absolute equivalence, for it seems to be what we
bring to nature, which knows no absolute numbers. What is called
non-Euclidean geometry, the discovery that Euclidean principles do
not apply universally, but only in local worlds like ours constituted
according to certain spatio-physical conditions, offers nature an
escape from the chill indifference of human mathematics.
Efforts to rescue us from numerality, whether through the ruses
of numerology, the rhetorics of redemption or the routines of revo-
lutionary theory, represent themselves as the substitution of quality
for quantity, and of force for form. But they fail to recognize the force
that is represented in the principle of numerality, and are numb to
the fact that the quantitative has a quality and force all of its own.
What is more, this quantality, this quantical quality, the quality of
being able to be represented as quantity through number, is impli-
cated, indeed, it is an imperative principle, in every attempt to re-
deem numerality by numerology, since the innumerable will never
be able to purge itself entirely of the enumerable. The force of
numerality may become visible only rarely ‘as such’ – indeed, per-
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haps it is the one-and-one-and-one-and-one of the chronic which

ought to qualify as the exotic ‘event’, rather than the eruption of
kairetic significance – but it is the virus within kairetic thinking
which gives it all its virulence. Only chronos, the possibility of think-
ing of moments as moments, which is to say as enumerable units,
both distinguishable and equivalent, makes kairos possible.
Much twentieth-century writing, including, in particular, the
works of Kafka and Beckett, has attempted to represent or approxi-
mate to this kind of anti-kairetic revelation, the revelation of the
indefinite condition of finitude, disallowing any kind of lift-off into
the infinite (for what is the notion of the infinite but the triumph of
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number, the eternality of the externality that is counting?), against

which all our habits of thought and experience are ranged. We will
see it at work in Chapter Nine in the painting of Roman Opałka.
Beckett’s characters are addicted to counting, but also liable to lose
count; indeed the latter is probably the reason for, and consequence
of, the former. As for example at the beginning of ‘The Expelled’:

There were not many steps. I had counted them a thousand

times, both going up and coming down, but the figure has
gone from my mind. I have never known whether you should
say one with your foot on the sidewalk, two with the follow-
ing foot on the first step, and so on, or whether the sidewalk
shouldn’t count. At the top of the steps I fell foul of the same
dilemma. In the other direction, I mean from top to bottom,
it was the same, the word is not too strong. I did not know
where to begin nor where to end, that’s the truth of the
matter. I arrived therefore at three totally different figures,
without ever knowing which of them was right. And when I
say that the figure has gone from my mind, I mean that none
of the three figures is with me any more, in my mind. It is
true that if I were to find, in my mind, where it is certainly to
be found, one of these figures, I would find it and it alone,
without being able to deduce from it the other two. And even
were I to recover two, I would not know the third. No, I
would have to find all three, in my mind, in order to know
all three. Memories are killing. So you must not think of cer-
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tain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must
think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding
them, in your mind, little by little. That is to say, you must
think of them a good while, every day several times a day,
until they sink forever in the mud. That’s an order.11

Mathematicians are less at home in this world than those who

think of themselves as unmathematical. Their effort is to generate
quality from this grey, toiling mortar of indifference, to build from
it a variegated landscape, of pattern, recurrence, contour. And most
of all to avoid counting. Solutions that rely on the simple counting
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out or counting up of possibilities are known by mathematicians as

‘brute force solutions’, because they do not involve any calculation.
There is mathematics in the head of the sunflower because it has dis-
covered, or rather is itself the stochastic precipitate of the discovery,
that the most efficient way to pack seeds in a given space is to coil
them in a spiral at intervals of .618 of a complete rotation, the Golden
Section, or the ratio between successive numbers in the Fibonacci
sequence. But the mathematics of the sunflower is immanent to it,
not something it can do. Because it is in itself the performance, it
cannot perform it for itself. So counting seems unmathematical,
because it seems closer to the mathematics that we are than the
mathematics we do – hence, perhaps, brutish, natura naturans rather
than natura naturata. Perhaps one answer to the Red Queen’s ques-
tion, what is one and one and one and one . . .? might be me, the one
that never comes out as one.
Counting is at the heart of mathematical procedure, because
every mathematical procedure amounts to, or can come down to,
counting. (Whenever one uses an expression like ‘every x’, one is
saying that, if one were to count out all the procedures in question,
there would be none left over.) And yet mathematics and counting
are inimical to each other. We learn to count, which is to say, we train
ourselves into a kind of automatism. Counting is never something
we can exactly do, precisely because we have in it to give ourselves
over to a doing that does itself. The ambivalence of this is noted in
Elizabeth Sewell’s The Field of Nonsense. She argues that
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The Nonsense writer wants to make a world out of language

and the mind’s pattern of reality, but reality which will be
remade so as to be more subject to number; and the charac-
teristics of number and order will have to be imparted to the
images in the mind so that they too may be controlled, dis-
tinguishable from one another, going along one at a time in
an ordered series, limited and exact.12

The use of numbers allows for this control because perceptions ‘will
be brought under stricter control than is usual in language, and in
this state they could be played with’.13 But number involves two
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associated principles: that of distinctness of units, and that of

seriality. Sewell associates them, but there are occasional hints that
they may pull in opposite directions, as when she writes that ‘as the
mention of any number must do, it sets the mind running along the
familiar and ordered series of natural numbers. The mind by the very
mention of number is delivered into the hands of its own ordering tendency.’14
In Nonsense, the mind is given the freedom to play by a formaliza-
tion that makes it more the master of the world; but this kind of play
also means that one is at a certain risk of being played with by the
ordering impulse that is essentially correlative to the impulse to play.
Life expresses itself most fully in play, in which death is inevitably
recruited.
We can extend this far beyond the writing of Nonsense. The
horror of counting is that there is no end to it. Compulsive counters
seem to want to make the world controllable by reducing it to number,
by making it enumerable. But compulsive counters are also typically
themselves compelled by the force of compulsion they attempt to ex-
ercise upon the world, as may be seen from James Boswell’s account
of Samuel Johnson’s anxious rituals for negotiating thresholds:

He had another particularity, of which none of his friends

ever ventured to ask an explanation. It appeared to me some
superstitious habit, which he had contracted early, and from
which he had never called upon his reason to disentangle
him. This was his anxious care to go out or in at a door or
passage, by a certain number of steps from a certain point,
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or at least so as that either his right or left foot, (I am not

certain which,) should constantly make the first actual
movement when he came close to the door or passage. Thus
I conjecture: for I have, upon innumerable occasions, ob-
served him suddenly stop, and then seem to count his steps
with a deep earnestness; and when he had neglected or gone
wrong in this sort of magical movement, I have seen him go
back again, put himself in a proper posture to begin the
ceremony, and, having gone through it, break from his
abstraction, walk briskly on, and join his companion.15

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Boswell’s description makes it clear that counting is never

enough, since counting must itself be subject to checking, which is
to say, recounting. And, when counting itself becomes subject to the
force of counting, where is any end to be made, how is one ever to
cross the threshold into a result?

Less than One

Counting means adding one to one to one to one. One adds one,
then adds another one, then another. But what is one of something?
Who has ever truly seen one of anything? There can be one only once
there is two; but then there can never be one again. One is the quality
of oneness that any one thing has in common with another thing
that can be counted as one. This is Bertrand Russell’s definition of a
number, as ‘the set of those classes that are similar to a given class’,
where ‘similar to’ means having the same number of elements.16 One
must be able to count two things as one for either one of them to
count as one. In counting, one is never a complete unit, for it
depends upon the possibility of there being another one. Unless
there could be another one to be added to any one, it would remain
less than one, come up short of the one that it must nevertheless be
taken to be in order for counting to ensue. You must just assume you
know what one is in order to add another one to it, even though only
that addition will confirm the oneness of the one. One completes it-
self in the sundering into two that will keep it eternally at a distance
from itself.
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There are two modalities of the one. There is the oneness of

indivisibility, that in which no difference of parts may be discerned.
Such a one is not countable as one, precisely because there is nothing
that does not belong to it. This, presumably, is the condition of the
Lord God, brooding in his self-belonging prior to the creation, or
the oneness of the universe, which must by definition include every-
thing. Then there is the one that counts as one, the one that may be
counted off, that is one as the first unit in a sequence, meaning that
it is one that is seen from the viewpoint of two or more, the more
that two means. This is perhaps the reason why the Greeks did not
count one as a number. To make the One of the Allness of the
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cosmos into a one, it must be mutilated into unity. If there really were
only the One, if there were no real division in the universe, then that
universe would not yet be thinkable of as a one, for it would not be
possible to step outside it to count to two. One must always be more
than one in order to avoid being less than one. One is always a more-
than-one that is less than one, for counting will never let you get the
one to add up exactly to itself.
Problems that can only be solved by brute force, such as the
varieties of the Travelling Salesman Problem, or tsp, which involves
finding the shortest itinerary between any sequence of points that
will involve visiting each point once and only once, are regarded as
mathematically insoluble. The fact that ant colonies are able to solve
this kind of problem by trial and error, and that artificial ant colonies
may be generated to do it, does not make the solutions any more
mathematical, because they are all blind, and it is this blindness
that accounts for the horror of merely counting. Mathematics is the
sidestepping or recoil from this horror.
Horror, because horror is at its heartless heart uncountability.
Freud suggests that the head of the Medusa signifies castration, not
just because it is decapitated, but in ‘confirmation of the technical
rule according to which a multiplication of penis symbols signifies
castration’.17 No mention of this ‘technical rule’ appears to my
knowledge anywhere else in Freud, which suggests a nonce-rule, or
a once-rule, a rule which is more-than-one (as all rules have to be),
yet also less-than-one (since it is a rule applied and probably invented
only for this occasion, like Rule Forty-two in Alice’s court).18 Norman
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O. Brown remarks that, in this world where the many can stand both
for the less than one and the more than one that protects against it,
‘we are in a world oscillating between the one and the many, a world
of fission and fusion, the world of schizophrenia; the world of the
schizophrenic patient whose “primary function in life, as he saw it,
was to restore people who had been multilated”.’19 Horror refers to
the sensation of bristling, in which the skin, that organic avatar of
the integer, may lose its integrity, standing up as though multiplied
into hairs, or shivering, shuddering or quaking. Horror is dispersal
amid horripilated multiplicity, a dissolution into the innumerable.
Horror is simply losing count.
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Counting up and counting out are defences against this horror

of indifference, but they also threaten to expose us to it. Counting
opens us up to the one-by-one of every composition, the material
substrate of every relation. It delivers us to the very dread of losing
count from which it preserves us. Noel Carroll’s Philosophy of Horror
suggests that horror is a reaction to forms of categorical incom-
pleteness or indistinctness.20 It might seem as though the horror
of number contradicts this, since number is the very principle of
distinctness. But there is a special horror in the indistinctness that
results from the pseudo-distinctiveness of number. A quantity is
definite and absolute, it may seem to have an aura or quality about it.
But it is made up of the joining of a certain number of indistinct units,
indistinct because they have to be accumulations of the absolutely
identical, of an entity added inexorably to itself. There can be little
doubt that the horror of insects has to do with their multiplicity, with
the sense of unbearable, spawning multitude they provoke – if they
crawl over us, they induce the sensation of our skin itself, as we say,
crawling. The categorial uncertainty of the spider surely has some-
thing to do with the fact that we are not sure how many legs it has
(eight is just beyond the limit of our power to grasp a number with-
out needing to count it). Knowing that it has eight and not six is a
sort of protection against the sheer uncountability of its legs. Added
to this is the horror that the fly or spider seems indifferent to the
subtraction of one or more of its legs. So spiders and flies embody
the horror of number because they seem so indifferent to the very
numbers that differentiate them. Numbering is a superstitious pro-
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tection against number. No millipede has a thousand legs, though

some have as many as 750. I have heard that it is impossible for a
centipede to have a hundred legs, but for a reason that, for some
reason, I find truly appalling, namely that centipedes always have an
odd number of pairs of legs.
Most cultures distinguish odd from even numbers, and many
see odd numbers as luckier or more powerful than even.21 The
Pythagoreans believed that odd numbers were male and ‘lordly’.22
This belief is still at work in Shakespeare’s Falstaff, who, in The Merry
Wives of Windsor, declares that ‘there is divinity in odd numbers, either
in nativity, chance or death’, and in Cleopatra, who laments, on
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hearing of the death of Antony, that ‘the odds is gone/ And there is
nothing left remarkable/ Beneath the visiting moon’, where ‘the odds’
seems to mean that which stands out savingly from the lunar churn
of mere recurrence.23 The odd seems to have become identified more
recently with the principle of the absurd, the residual or the un-
finished, precisely because it seems to nudge us on into a bad infinity
of uncompletable succession, a temporality in which we can never
succeed in being on time. Why else is it that when you awaken dis-
orientated in the night, the time shown on a digital clock always
seems to be an odd number – 1.29, or 3.13?
Counting belongs to both sides of number, to the formed and
the formless, the discontinuous and the endlessly ongoing. But
counting always exposes one to the chance of losing count. We teach
children to count to protect them against the horror, claustrophobic
and agoraphobic at once, of the one and one and one and one of the
countless or uncountable.
And, if one way of responding to the horror of number’s
indifference is to seek forms of concentration, another is to seek
to identify with radiation. This is to set the distributive against the
distinctive. Being is necessarily locative; it belongs to deixis, here,
now, this. But there are those who identify not with the where and
when of being, but with the fields of distributed relations within
which being clusters and condenses: not with position, but with
disposition. Not ‘I am painting,’ or ‘this is my painting,’ but ‘there
is painting.’ Some of these have found in the field called art a way
of not identifying with identity, but with the fields within which
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identity is figurable, with the ground against which the figure

stands out. It need not be art, and insisting on art’s priority in this
is a failure of nerve. It is just that art offers some ways of doing
what may be done otherwise. The doodler knows a minor form of
this radiative drive, the desire to fill space with relations, the desire
not to be in space, but to be it. The artist is identified with the brush,
the stylus, the mark with which one makes one’s mark. But the
field of art has been attractive to some, in the way that mathematics
is to others, because it can sometimes also allow the possibility of
diffusing oneself across the system of relations, not concentrating
oneself at the tip of the brush, but inhabiting the entire apparatus,
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hand, eye, canvas. The saturation of space and the emptying of

space are here equivalent, because both are equivalence itself. The
preposition that governs this kind of work, this work that works
against the standing out of work, is across. The plain must become
the plane.
The ideology of number in the modern world is that number is
inhumanly exact, while the realm of the word, the tone, the gesture,
is vitally imprecise. We are many of us still spontaneous Bergsonians
in this respect, favouring the fuzzy continuities of the temporal
against the harsh, anonymous, mechanical, severing pseudo-
exactness of the spatial. The phrase ‘the exact sciences’ sums up the
difference between the realms of the inhuman mathematical and the
human. But the mathematical is not the realm of number. The
exposure to pure number, or pure exposure to number, exacts a kind
of horror or delirium, which does not belong to either side of the
exact/inexact equation, precisely because it is not equal to anything,
not even itself.
Literary writing will often incorporate the idea of number as
exactness, in order to immunize itself against it, in order to keep
the equation balanced between the mathematical–mechanical and
the unmathematical organic, in order to assert the powers of life
over the deathliness of number. But the deathliness of number is
also a strange life-in-death. Freud’s account of the way in which
the death instinct routes itself through life is a dramatization of
this. Death wishes to be the zero that answers and balances the one
that is life. But in order to do this, life must be made to add up to
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one – death that supervened upon a life that was not yet a life would
not be death. So death must put itself off, must start a count
through life that will never come to an end, since being alive means
losing count. To die exactly is impossible, because there are too
many things to be ‘lived off ’, as Freud weirdly, brilliantly puts it, of
which account would have to be taken.24 The failure to be one, the
certainty of losing count in the more-than-one that will always be
less-than-one, is what puts number, the very domain of the deathly,
on the side of life, as the indefinite, as the not-yet-finished, the ‘un-
nullable least’ or ‘leastmost all’, as Beckett puts it, that can never
be reached.25 The fact that numbers can never properly add up to
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 horror of number

anything, that number can never fully come to an end, is what

makes number so deathly and yet allies it with a kind of craving
agitation that can come close to rapture. This is the delirious
horror of number.
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 4
Moder n Mea su r e s

‘What Have I to Do with Millions?’

Writers and literary critics have often thought of themselves as
representative of a rival estate to number, that of the word, and have
been keen to assert the ways in which literary texts may have offered
forms of exception or demur from social and political pressures
to extend quantification and calculative rationality. Literature is
represented as providing a growling, and occasionally, as in a novel
like Dickens’s Hard Times, a clamorous non placet to such norms.
Increasingly during the nineteenth century, literature sees it as its
role to respond to and resist the empire of number. Accounting and
calculation become the opposite of the kinds of human experience
to which the arts, and especially the literary arts, give expression. As
the dominion of number grows, so does the assumption that it is the
vocation of literature (and, for some, of art in general, but literature
has a favoured role) to embody the values of the singular and the
particular against the mass, the mean, the normalizing aggregate,
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and to resist the growing ascendancy of the quantitative over the

qualitative. This anti-numerical ideology is articulated by Jane Eyre,
when she complains bitterly of her public denunciation as a liar, and
refuses Helen’s consolation:

‘Everybody, Jane? Why, there are only eighty people who have
heard you called so, and the world contains hundreds of
millions.’
‘But what have I to do with millions? The eighty, I know,
despise me.’1

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George Eliot, who thought more seriously than most other

nineteenth-century novelists about questions of scale and quantity,
also represents this point of view, in Lydgate’s reflections on entering
the medical profession: ‘Considering that statistics had not yet em-
braced a calculation as to the number of ignorant or canting doctors
which absolutely must exist in the teeth of all changes, it seemed
to Lydgate that a change in the units was the most direct mode of
changing the numbers.’2 In fact, from the nineteenth century
onwards, the ways in which art and literature would seek to secede
from the republic of number began to take necessarily numerical
forms – as literature sometimes represented itself as the guardian
of the one against the many, the moiety against the mass, and
sometimes as the asserter of the infinite against the finite.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was among those who were most atten-
tive to the onward march of number. Like many others, from Hegel
onwards, he found an image for the coordination of the singular and
the multiple in the figure of Napoleon, writing that ‘if any man is
found to carry with him the power and affections of vast numbers, if
Napoleon is France, if Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people
whom he sways are little Napoleons.’3 Napoleon is representative of
the ‘living labor’ of democratic capitalists, as opposed to the ‘dead
labor’ of conservatives whose capital is locked up massively but
inertly in land and buildings:

The first class is timid, selfish, illiberal, hating innovation,

and continually losing numbers by death. The second class
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is selfish also, encroaching, bold, self-relying, always

outnumbering the other and recruiting its numbers every
hour by births. It desires to keep open every avenue to the
competition of all, and to multiply avenues: the class of
business men in America, in England, in France and
throughout Europe; the class of industry and skill. Napoleon
is its representative.4

Emerson represents these two classes mathematically, in terms

of an unbalanced sum, with stagnation in one column and increase
in the other, but, in a sense, he is really counterposing two modes of
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number: number as mere quantity and number raised, so to speak,

to the power of numerousness. These masses of little Napoleons are
not just manifold, but, in their powers of expansion, represent the
accretive power of number itself. Emerson opposes intensity of
experience to the calculation of quantity. Writing of religious
experience in ‘The Over-soul’, he says

Our religion vulgarly stands on numbers of believers. When-

ever the appeal is made, – no matter how indirectly, – to
numbers, proclamation is then and there made that religion
is not. He that finds God a sweet enveloping thought to him
never counts his company . . . It makes no difference
whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The faith that
stands on authority is not faith. The reliance on authority
measures the decline of religion, the withdrawal of the soul.5

The same principle of non-quantifiable intensity is articulated in

Emerson’s ‘The Transcendentalist’: ‘It is the quality of the moment,
not the number of days, of events, or of actors, that imports.’6 The
injunction to seize the day is an old and frequently renewed one, of
course; but the framing of such an injunction, not as a snatching
of some precious thing from oblivion, but as a defiance of the
homogeneity seemingly induced by number-consciousness, seems
a distinctively nineteenth-century gesture. And yet it is also charac-
teristic of this defiance that it must borrow from what it breaks from.
In ‘Experience’, Emerson writes that
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To finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step

of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is
wisdom. It is not the part of men, but of fanatics, or of
mathematicians, if you will, to say, that, the shortness of life
considered, it is not worth caring whether for so short a
duration we were sprawling in want, or sitting high. Since
our office is with moments, let us husband them. Five
minutes of today are worth as much to me, as five minutes
in the next millennium.7

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The statistician and the political economist are blamed for

reducing everything to equivalence and thereby emptying everything
of value. But standing out against the principle of equivalence en-
joins another kind of mathematics; for Emerson does not counsel
any simple abandonment to the passing moment, but rather a vigi-
lant accountancy of ‘the greatest number of good hours’. Emerson’s
anti-quantitative calculus is repeated in Walter Pater’s urging, some
25 years later, that, with ‘a counted number of pulses’ only being our
mortal allowance, we learn to ‘pass most swiftly from point to point,
and be present always at the locus where the greatest number of vital
forces unite in their purest energy’.8 Since we inhabit only a brief
interval of time, and ‘our one chance lies in expanding that interval,
in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time’, only
an intensive sensory calculus will permit us to resist our finitude.9
It is highly characteristic of efforts to substitute quality for
quantity from the nineteenth century onwards that the path beyond
number should seem always to have to pass through it. Matthew
Arnold complained in his Culture and Anarchy (1869) of the tendency
for socially reforming ideas to get swallowed up in bureaucracy:

an English law . . . is ruled by no clear idea about the citizen’s

claim and the State’s duty, but has, in compensation, a mass
of minute mechanical details about the number of members
on a school-committee, and how many shall be a quorum,
and how they shall be summoned, and how often they shall
meet.10
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But in discerning what Arnold called ‘the intelligible law of things’,

and in offering the claim that literature should protect the particular,
the anomalous and the minute, such a criticism did not so much
reject number as implicitly prefer small numbers to large, hence the
quality of elective minority that has characterized modern literary
and cultural self-definitions. Arnold declared in Culture and Anarchy:

when we speak of ourselves as divided into Barbarians,

Philistines, and Populace, we must be understood always to
imply that within each of these classes there are a certain
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number of aliens, if we may so call them, – persons who

are mainly led, not by their class spirit, but by a general
humane spirit, by the love of human perfection; and that
this number is capable of being diminished or augmented.
I mean, the number of those who will succeed in develop-
ing this happy instinct will be greater or smaller, in propor-
tion both to the force of the original instinct within them,
and to the hindrance or encouragement which it meets
from without.11

Following Arnold, F. R. Leavis suggested in his 1930 pamphlet

Mass Civilization and Minority Culture that

A reader who grew up with Wordsworth moved among a

limited set of signals (so to speak): the variety was not
overwhelming. So he was able to acquire discrimination as
he went along. But the modern is exposed to a concourse
of signals so bewildering in their variety and number that,
unless he is specially gifted or especially favoured, he can
hardly begin to discriminate. Here we have the plight of cul-
ture in general. The landmarks have shifted, multiplied and
crowded upon one another, the distinctions and dividing
lines have blurred away, the boundaries are gone.12

It should not be too surprising, in a book the title of which so

openly endorses the principle of ratio in its critical reasoning, to find
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an economic metaphor at its head: what Leavis calls the ‘accepted

valuations’ of a culture ‘are a kind of paper currency based upon a
very small proportion of gold’.13
During the nineteenth century, the conditions of production and
circulation of literary texts became ever more, and more conspicu-
ously, bound up with large numbers. As literature became a mass
phenomenon, the second half of the nineteenth century saw, not
just an avalanche of numbers, but a secondary landslide of words,
in huge numbers. Not only did literature become a mass-market
phenomenon, it also, like so much else in our fantasy of the Victorian,
itself became massive (there is a certain rite of passage undergone

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by every student of English who is tempted to trumpet the alleged

fact that Victorian novels are so long and loquacious because
Victorian authors were paid by the word). In other words, literature
became, as it had always been of course, but now more copiously
and conspicuously, and as part of its own self-understanding,
quantitative – much of a muchness.
So, while literature found itself opposed to the order of number,
it also found itself entering into it, meaning that there was a deep
participation of number in writing and writing in number from the
middle of the nineteenth century onwards. But this is not just a
question for literature, or is a question for literature precisely
because it is such a general question. Literary writing is ever more
suffused with numbers and numerical awareness, because number,
in the prodigious variety of its aspects and occasions, entered
indissociably into so many forms of modern experience.
The later nineteenth century saw the beginnings of a curiosity
about the nature of the perception of number, or the inner life of
numerical consciousness. In the early 1880s, Francis Galton, that
great, obsessive counter of everything, from the number of shocks
he received on a train journey from London to Liverpool to the
number of fidgets per minute in a bored audience, became interested
in the subjective processes attached to number itself.14 His work in
the early 1880s was driven by two interlocking preoccupations: the
‘psychometric’ idea of measuring and quantifying mental processes,
and the mental processes attaching to quantity and measure. Along
with essays on the statistics of imagination, Galton also published
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work on the visualization of numbers. He even toyed with the

possibility of conducting arithmetic by smell.15
Number did not simply assault experience, it penetrated and
transformed it. At the inauguration of what would become known
as phenomenology, or the philosophy that dealt with the way things
appeared to the mind, separate from the quasi-mathematical ques-
tions of what was true, real or coherent, there is Edmund Husserl’s
first book, Philosophy of Arithmetic, an expansion of his Habilitations-
schrift of 1887, ‘On the Concept of Number’ (‘Uber den Begriff der
Zahl’), a work criticized by Frege for its emphasis on psychology
rather than logic.16
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From the late nineteenth century onwards, literary writing began

to move ever closer to number. In certain areas, notably in France
and in Russia, a quasi-mystical mathematical poetics asserted itself,
especially in writers like Mallarmé and Valéry in France. In Britain
and Germany, mathematics itself slowly began to change its charac-
ter over the nineteenth century. In the first part of the century, num-
ber could still be thought of as what Mary Poovey calls the ‘modern
fact’: ‘modern facts are assumed to reflect things that actually exist,
and they are recorded in a language that seems transparent. Since
the early nineteenth century, this transparent language has been
epitomized by numerical representation.’17 Over the course of the
nineteenth century, mathematics became ever more formal, more
relational, more projective and speculative in its forms. That is to say,
it became ever more abstracted from the visible and verifiable facts
of physical and social life. Non-Euclidean and n-dimensional geo-
metries became a staple of late nineteenth-century supernaturalism.
If, in the first half of the nineteenth century, numbers appeared to
lock down indefiniteness, in the second half, the emphasis was in-
creasingly on variation, frequency and fields of distribution. Instead
of the quantification of uncertainty, the second half of the nineteenth
century saw something like the virtualizing of number. A certain
number mania emerges intelligibly from this inversion in early
twentieth-century writing.
For a modernist writer, it might have seemed self-evident that
the realm of number was becoming ever more abstract, autonomous
and powerful; ever more firmly and ever more grimly set over against
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what modern writers began to think of as the ‘life-world’. In a cen-

tury of mass slaughter, number comes in fact to be the name of death
itself. As is often the case, this apprehension fails to account for the
most striking features of numerical and calculative awareness, and
fails so totally that one must suspect that it does so in order precisely
to defend against them, and to defend in particular against the
acknowledgement of the ways in which the life of number has both
proliferated and transformed from the nineteenth century onwards.
Rather than locking the life-world up in an iron cage of calculative
rationality, number begins to thread through social and personal life
as intricately as the vascular system.
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Scale
As social relations were expressed more and more in number,
representations of number tended to stress its alienness. Numbers
came to stand for the inhuman, the mechanical, the unconscious,
the impersonal, the inert. W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Numbers and Faces’
articulates what might be called the humanist ideology of number. I
do not have much fondness for the word ideology, which is often just
a way of describing somebody else’s ideas in such a way as to repre-
sent them not as ideas at all but as a kind of mental illness – but in
this case, the systematic preference for the unsystematic that is
expressed in an opposition to number does seem to make the term
appropriate. Auden finds those of a numerological persuasion, who
suggest that life is governed by the mystic force of certain ‘small
numbers’, merely ‘benignly potty’, in contrast with the totalitarian
statisticians of mass existence, who ‘go horridly mad’.18
Against the obsessive–compulsive wielders of number, either at
the minor, neurotic scale, or on a major, despotic scale, Auden prom-
ises the ultimate unquantifiability of human relations signalled by
the non-numerical uniqueness of the face, ‘for calling/ Infinity a
number does not make it one.’19
Modern writers, and the critics who formed the climate in which
they lived, moved and had their being, tended to conflate the realm
of number with the fact of large numbers, which they identified with
blurring, conformity and standardization of response. The liberal
view of quantification is expressed by E. M. Forster in his novel
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Howards End, in the person of Ernst Schlegel:

‘It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to

think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times
more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million
square miles are almost the same as heaven. That is not
imagination. No, it kills it. When their poets over here try to
celebrate bigness they are dead at once, and naturally.’20

There was often a sinister underside to this in the evocation of

the unnumberable mass to be found in the nightmares of liberal
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intellectuals and anti-democrats alike, as laid out so chillingly in John

Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses.21 We might find this enacted in
D. H. Lawrence’s beastly poem ‘How Beastly the Bourgeois Is’:

Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man’s need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life face
him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.22

Lawrence’s own reaction, when faced with this ‘new demand on

his understanding’, is a collapse of his own into homicidal sogginess:

How beastly the bourgeois is!

Standing in their thousands, these appearances,

in damp England
what a pity they can’t all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly

into the soil of England.23

In ‘Let the Dead Bury Their Dead’, the dead ‘are in myriads’ – not
so much because there are myriads of them, but because multiplicity
is death itself:
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The dead in their seething minds

have phosphorescent teeming white words
of putrescent wisdom and sapience that subtly stinks;
don’t ever believe them.

The dead are in myriads, they seem mighty.

They make trains chuff, motor-cars titter, ships lurch,
mills grind on and on,
and keep you in millions at the mills, sightless pale slaves,
pretending these are the mills of God.24
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Numbers like ‘thousands’ and ‘millions’ here become the very

bearers of unimaginability. The nescient hordes of the unimaginative
are mathematically generalized into the unimaginable, enabling
them to be swept away all as one and all at once.
Not that Lawrence was always opposed to the dominion of number,
provided that the numbers were small and precise enough, as becomes
clear in ‘Tortoise Shell’, his meditation on the cruciform patternings
of a tortoise’s body in the volume Birds, Beasts and Flowers of 1923:

It needed Pythagoras to see life playing with counters

on the living back
Of the baby tortoise;
Life establishing the first eternal mathematical tablet . . .

Turn him on his back,

The kicking little beetle,
And there again, on his shell-tender, earth-touching belly,
The long cleavage of division, upright of the eternal cross
And on either side count five,
On each side, two above, on each side, two below
The dark bar horizontal.
The Cross!25

Lawrence was the modernist writer who mounted the most

sustained assault against the realm of number, determined as he was
to assert quality over quantity, the hazy, nebular, indefinite or indis-
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tinct, which is said to be living, over the exact and numerable world,
which is said to be abstract, mechanical and dead (or male for short).
In the words of Birkin in Women in Love, this modulates into an
aristocratic ideology of the absolute nonrelativity of value:

‘We’re all the same in point of number. But spiritually there

is pure difference and neither equality nor inequality counts.
It is upon these two bits of knowledge that you must found
a state. Your democracy is an absolute lie – your brotherhood
of man is a pure falsity, if you apply it further than the
mathematical abstraction.’26
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In fact, however, Lawrence’s writing, so relentlessly pitted

against number, is in fact more strangely mesmerized by it than
almost any other modern writer (I have a feeling that there is a higher
number of number words to be found in his work, especially big-
number words, like hundreds, thousands and millions, than in most
other modern writers). There is, for example, Gudrun, thinking
about Gerald’s mechanism:

The wheel-barrow – the one humble wheel – the unit of the

firm. Then the cart, with two wheels; then the truck, with
four; then the donkey-engine, with eight, then the winding-
engine, with sixteen, and so on, till it came to the miner, with
a thousand wheels, and then the electrician, with three thou-
sand, and the underground manager, with twenty thousand,
and the general manager with a hundred thousand little
wheels working away to complete his make-up, and then
Gerald, with a million wheels and cogs and axles.
Poor Gerald, such a lot of little wheels to his make-up! He
was more intricate than a chronometer-watch. But oh
heavens, what weariness! What weariness, God above! A
chronometer-watch – a beetle – her soul fainted with utter
ennui, from the thought. So many wheels to count and con-
sider and calculate! Enough, enough – there was an end to
man’s capacity for complications, even. Or perhaps there
was no end.27
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Two antagonistic principles are locked together here, as they perhaps

are in every articulation of the ideology of number. The first is the
idea of Gerald’s mechanism, which consists in reducing life to dis-
tinct and countable units, to produce order, control and predictability.
But this very exactness produces the intolerable indistinctness of the
indifferently non-identical, the ‘madness of dead mechanical
monotony and meaninglessness’. In its account of Gudrun’s
meditations, Lawrence’s narration becomes a kind of counting-up
procedure, going up in squares, 1, 2, 4, 16, but precisely in order to
be able to open on to the uncountable ‘so on’, the losing count that
lurks in every counting procedure.
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What is there to set against this? There are the various forms of
intensity, the modernist moments of being, the radiant epiphanies,
the absolutely singular and incommensurable ‘events’. In Women in
Love, there is Mrs Crich, who ‘lost more and more count of the world,
she seemed rapt in some glittering abstraction, almost purely
unconscious’ – though ‘she bore many children.’ And there is
Hermione, in her consuming fantasy of murdering Birkin:

A terrible voluptuous thrill ran down her arms – she was

going to know her voluptuous consummation. Her arms
quivered and were strong, immeasurably and irresistibly
strong. What delight, what delight in strength, what delir-
ium of pleasure! She was going to have her consummation
of voluptuous ecstasy at last . . . She lifted her arm high to
aim once more, straight down on the head that lay dazed on
the table. She must smash it, it must be smashed before her
ecstasy was consummated, fulfilled for ever. A thousand
lives, a thousand deaths mattered nothing now, only the
fulfilment of this perfect ecstasy.28

Moments of intensity must be rescued from the nightmare of

monotonous numbering, but the logic that does the rescuing must
nevertheless be numerical, first, in that it derives from and depends
upon the rounding up or counting-as-one of the idea of the ‘mathem-
atical’ or the ‘mechanical’, and, second, in that it must assert itself
as a transcendent one, now conceived as an absolute, and entirely
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impossible, equality to itself. It is a transcendent counting-as-one of

that which transcends counting altogether, but is really an apotheo-
sis of the number one, as though there could be a one that bore no
relation to any other kind of singularity. But a singularity that bore
no relation to any other singularity would not be anything. Lawrence
retreats from numerical horror, in which the ones can never be got
to add up into a nameable, numerable total, into numerical fantasy,
the idea of a one that must always hover asymptotically below the
threshold of the dead consummation of being a one comparable to
any other one (the horror of democracy). There is an erosion of the
one at either end of the scale, the elementary and the ultimate.
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Numeration is the deterrence of this erosion, this failure of the one

to stand up and be counted. Ecstasy, epiphany, the event, are the sin-
gular without seriality, a consummation that can never be summed
up, a uniqueness that goes beyond or refuses to be cashed in as the
merely unitary, which is the nullity of the one-like-another-one.
Lawrence is enraged at the capacity of number to resist numer-
ation, its capacity to make us lose count. He declares in ‘Bestwood’,
‘What we should strive for is life and the beauty of aliveness, imag-
ination, awareness, and contact. To be perfectly alive is to be
immortal.’29 Lawrence sees quantity as death itself – but acting on
the impulse to preserve life against death actually requires the
most brutal entry of all into the quantitative, in the form of social
culling: ‘I know that we should look after the quality of life, not the
quantity. Hopeless life should be put to sleep, the idiots and the
hopeless sick and the true criminal. And the birth-rate should be
controlled.’30
A sinking feeling assails liberal-authoritarian modernists, in
the sudden, horrified sense that the world might indeed be full of
individual minds, of which the measure might never be able to be
taken. The preference for the small over the great, as we find it
articulated for example in Virginia Woolf, goes along with a certain
desire for accumulation, or enlargement of scale and number –
‘One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with, she reflected. Fifty pairs
of eyes were not enough to get round that one woman with, she
thought.’31 Modernism flees, not from number as such, but from
large numbers into small numbers. Though modern literature and
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culture may try to get themselves on the other side of number, the
very obsession with this anumerical project makes modern writing
quantical at every turn.
This seems to mirror the actual leaning, both of mathematical
reasoning, and of the technical and engineering work based upon it
towards a sensitivity to very small numbers. Prompted by his discus-
sion of the importance of aluminium in the period he characterized as
that of ‘neotechnics’ as opposed to ‘paleotechnics’ (heavy industry)
of the previous century, Lewis Mumford wrote in his Technics and
Civilization (1934) that

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the significance of minute quantities – which we shall note

again in physiology and medicine – is characteristic of the
entire metallurgy and technics of the new phase. One might
say, for dramatic emphasis, that paleotechnics regarded only
the figures to the left of the decimal, whereas neotechnics is
preoccupied with those to the right.32

We may see this even earlier. The year 1900 saw the appearance
of two works that, following the number-magic of date-coincidence,
may be regarded as reciprocally illuminating. Sigmund Freud’s The
Interpretation of Dreams announced the method of psychoanalysis, a
method which depended upon the isolation and amplification of tiny
and seemingly insignificant phenomena of mental life, and Max
Planck’s formulation of the radiation law determined that the
radiation emitted by a hypothetical black body (a theoretically perfect
absorber of radiant energy) must be emitted in discrete packets or
quanta, each of them multiples of the value known thereafter as
Planck’s Constant. Quantum physics is so called because it is built
on Planck’s discovery that the world is not completely continuous at
the smallest scales. At these scales physical actions cannot take an
infinite number of values. Rather, those actions must be multiples
of a particular quantity. It is as though the world turned out to be
cubist at its core – the more one turned up the resolution, the more
blocky or granular it appeared to be. And it is precisely this granu-
larity that accounts for many of the disturbing features of quantum
mechanics, in which particles are not permitted to move smoothly
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and continuously from one state to another, as at higher scales,

which smooth out those spikes and jumps into continuous lines, but
rather must jump between conditions.
For both Freud and Planck, large significance inheres in tiny
variations detectable only by close and minute analysis. Both Freud
and Planck announce a world in which, as Virginia Woolf was to say
influentially in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’ (1921), we should not ‘take
it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought
big than in what is commonly thought small’.33 In fact, modernist
literature and criticism participates in what may be called the scale-
commutation that is characteristic of modern science, whereby small
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local fluctuations are amplified to have very large effects. Virginia

Woolf is typical in the large, rather booming claims she tends to
make in defence of the minute and the particular: as Kim Shirkhani
has written, ‘Woolf discredits analytical, abstract statements even as
she herself dispatches them.’34 The importance of the atom, and
of even smaller particles, is not so much their smallness as their
mathematical tractability, the fact that they moved, following the
work of Maxwell, Boltzmann, Planck and others, from the realm of
hypothesis into the realm of number and calculation. The sentence
in ‘Modern Fiction’ before the one I have just quoted in which Woolf
asks for an amplified attention to the small enjoins: ‘Let us record
the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they
fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent
in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the
consciousness.’35
Woolf ’s writing in fact evokes the communication between the
very large and the very small, and asks some of the same questions
about the mathematics of the very small and the very large as math-
ematicians asked. Often this involves reflection on the idea of
vibrations, with which there had been a general intoxication in art
and literature from the late nineteenth century onwards. Mrs Dalloway
evokes the slight yet huge perturbation of a magisterial car driving
up Bond Street:

The car had gone, but it had left a slight ripple which flowed
through glove shops and hat shops and tailors’ shops on
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both sides of Bond Street. For thirty seconds all heads were
inclined the same way – to the window. Choosing a pair of
gloves – should they be to the elbow or above it, lemon or
pale grey? – ladies stopped; when the sentence was finished
something had happened. Something so trifling in single
instances that no mathematical instrument, though capable
of transmitting shocks in China, could register the vibration;
yet in its fullness rather formidable and in its common appeal
emotional; for in all the hat shops and tailors’ shops
strangers looked at each other and thought of the dead; of
the flag; of Empire.36
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We are told of a hypothetical instrument of infinitesimal sensi-

tivity, not in order to discredit the notion of unconscious sensation,
but in order to validate it, by giving it a plausible correlate in the
physics of very small quantities. A similar kind of scale-commutation
occurs in the description of a First World War air raid in Woolf ’s The
Years (1937):

A gun boomed again. This time there was a bark in its boom.
‘Hampstead,’ said Nicholas. He took out his watch. The
silence was profound. Nothing happened. Eleanor looked
at the blocks of stone arched over their heads. She noticed a
spider’s web in one corner. Another gun boomed. A sigh
of air rushed up with it. It was right on top of them this time
. . . The Germans must be overhead now. She felt a curious
heaviness on top of her head. One, two, three, four, she
counted, looking up at the greenish-grey stone. Then there
was a violent crack of sound, like the split of lightning in the
sky. The spider’s web oscillated.37

Modernist writing is characterized, not by the eschewal of sys-

tems of calculation and enumeration – of time, money, people – but
the interest in the ways in which such systems could be converted
into each other. It is an interest, not in the units, but in the exchanges
between systems of units. This accounts for the interest in counting
to be found throughout the work of Joyce, Beckett, Lawrence, Woolf,
Sinclair and many others. For all these writers, counting is an in-
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dispensable way into the marking out of syncopations, or complex,

crossed rhythms.
Like many other modernists who devoted themselves to the
making out of other kinds of rhythms than those measured by the
clock, Woolf is closely attuned to the work of Henri Bergson, whose
doctoral dissertation, published in English as Time and Free Will (1910),
offers a critique of the idea that sensations have anything at all to do
with number. Sensations are registered in terms of variable intensity
in time, argues Bergson, while number relates to extension, that is,
to magnitudes juxtaposed in space. Bergson’s book is an extended
critique of the ‘psychophysics’ of the late nineteenth century, as
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epitomized by the quantitative views of sensation introduced by

Ernst Weber and Gustav Fechner, in particular the Weber–Fechner
law, which proposes that the intensity of a sensation is proportional
to the logarithm of the stimulus intensity. Bergson concluded that

in consciousness we find states which succeed, without

being distinguished from one another; and in space simul-
taneities which, without succeeding, are distinguished
from one another, in the sense that one has ceased to exist
when the other appears. Outside us, mutual externality
without succession; within us, succession without mutual
externality.38

Bergson sees number as a reduction of experience to merely

spatial relations. But it is Bergson himself who is guilty of the reduc-
tion, in his oddly archaic, even arthritic, imagination of space, and
his reduction of the operations of number to operations in and on
space. Here, it seems, mathematics can only play its part in a critique
of reductiveness if it has itself been plausibly but brutally reduced.

Mean
Modernist writing often strives to display its excess over number, but
also feels impelled to guard against the spilling exorbitance that is
characteristic of number. Accordingly, modernist writers often em-
brace the values of leanness and niggardly spareness – in versions of
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what Joyce called the art of ‘scrupulous meanness’ of his Dubliners.39

The term ‘meanness’ bulges oddly with alternative meanings. It
suggests that being mean with language may give more meaning, or
may focus attention purely on the meant. It may imply niggardness
or parsimony, or a focus on the smallness of the lives it discusses.
But it may also imply a kind of writing that hovers around the mean,
the intermediate or the average. One obsolete Old English meaning
of mean is fellowship or sexual intercourse, deriving from aphetic
Old English gemǣne, that which is shared or common, similar to
the Old Frisian mēne meaning assembly. There is a shimmer of
imprecision in the modernist mean.
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May Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriett Frean appeared in 1922, the
annus mirabilis of modernist experiment. The novel is concerned with
a life lived in self-sacrifice. It delivers a punitive measure for measure
in the matching of its mode to the self-denying structure of Harriett’s
life. The nursery-rhyme opening suggests comparisons with James
Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

‘Pussycat, Pussycat, where have you been?’

‘I’ve been to London, to see the Queen.’
‘Pussycat, pussycat, what did you there?’
‘I caught a little mouse under the chair.’

Her mother said it three times. And each time the Baby
Harriett laughed. The sound of her laugh was so funny that
she laughed again at that; she kept on laughing, with shriller
and shriller squeals.40

But, where Joyce’s novel shows a growth into style, Harriett

Frean’s narration allows scarcely any progression beyond this
pinched equivalence. Of course, in one sense, the novel intends us
to read it obliquely – to shrink from and protest against its mode, as
we recoil from the self-disavowing ethic. It gives us short measure
in order to provoke the angry and assertive hunger for more that
Harriett Frean learns to subdue. But it also depends upon the very
exactitude of accounting that it mocks and mourns. Its subject, of
course, is denied the power to read her own life in these terms. By
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the end of her life, exhausted and dimmed by the effort of self-
repression, Harriett is unable even to do the household accounts:
‘Her head dropped, drowsy, giddy over the week’s accounts. She gave
up even the semblance of her housekeeping’ (hf, 170).
There is a calculus of disease counted out remorselessly in the
novel that precisely lines up with the disease of calculation:

Months passed, years passed, going each one a little quicker

than the last. And Harriett was thirty-nine.
One evening, coming out of church, her mother fainted.
That was the beginning of her illness, February, eighteen
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eighty-three. First came the long months of weakness; then

the months and months of sickness; then the pain; the pain
she had been hiding, that she couldn’t hide any more. (hf,
99–100)

So the novel sets risk, adventure, love, self-assertion against the

keeping of strict moral accounts. But risk and adventure are just as
disastrous in the novel as prudent self-restraint. At its heart is the
catastrophic financial speculation of Harriett’s adored stockbroker
father:

‘There’s nothing gross and material about stock-broking. It’s

like pure mathematics. You’re dealing in abstractions, ideal
values, all the time. You calculate – in curves.’ His hand,
holding the unlit cigar, drew a curve, a long graceful one, in
mid-air. ‘You know what’s going to happen all the time.
‘ . . . The excitement begins when you don’t quite know
and you risk it; when it’s getting dangerous.
‘ . . . The higher mathematics of the game. If you can af-
ford them; if you haven’t a wife and family – I can see the
fascination . . .’ (hf, 38)

Harriett’s father not only goes in for reckless financial specula-

tion, the ‘higher mathematics of the game’, he also reads dangerous,
speculative books, by Darwin, Huxley and Spencer, all the time
impelled by ‘“fascination in seeing how far you can go”’ (hf, 41). But
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this is an intellectual improvidence that reduces, not only Frean’s

own family, but the friends who follow his advice. The novel insists
on the same remorseless code of equivalence that it condemns. Self-
repression will lead inevitably to hysteria, whether it takes the form
of the hysterical paralysis of Harriett’s friend Priscilla, or the out-
break of delirium that Harriett seems to suffer under the anaesthetic
during her cancer surgery. Moral restraint involves the keeping of
books, the mirroring repetition of the same: ‘They sat side by side at
the dinner table and in school, black head and golden brown leaning
to each other over the same book; they walked side by side in the
packed procession, going two by two’ (hf, 30). But Harriett cannot
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follow these books. She attempts to follow her father in his reckless
intellectual speculation:

She made a point of finishing every book she had begun, for
her pride couldn’t bear being beaten. Her head grew hot and
heavy: she read the same sentences over and over again; they
had no meaning; she couldn’t understand a single word of
Herbert Spencer. He had beaten her. As she put the book
back in its place she said to herself: ‘I mustn’t. If I go on, if
I get to the interesting part I may lose my faith.’ (hf, 43)

In the end, Sinclair’s Life and Death of Harriett Frean appears to

consume itself in poverty, swallowing up, with its exact balancing of
accounts, even the ironic supplement of awareness that would allow
one to see and condemn its narrowness. And yet the watchful
equilibrium it maintains requires a paradoxically spilling excess of
meanness, in which, with words reduced to obsessive numbering,
numbers threaten to overtake words, in the counting out, counting
down of time, age, money, hunger and desire that ticks and clicks
throughout the novel:

She knew what she would have. She would begin with a bun,
and go on through two sorts of jam to Madeira cake, and end
with raspberries and cream (hf, 12) . . . She passed through
her fourteenth year sedately, to the sound of Evangeline (hf,
26) . . . they walked side by side in the packed procession,
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going two by two (hf, 30) . . . Year after year the same. Her
mother parted her hair into two sleek wings (hf, 49) . . . Two,
three, five years passed, with a perceptible acceleration, and
Harriett was now thirty (hf, 67) . . . Eighteen seventy-nine:
it was the year her father lost his money. Harriett was nearly
thirty-five (hf, 82) . . . by the spring of eighteen-eighty he
was upstairs in his room, too ill to be moved (hf, 87) . . .
Harriett wondered why he was making that queer grating
and coughing noise. Three times (hf, 92) . . . Mr Hichens
had given them six weeks. They had to decide where they
would go (hf, 93) . . . Months passed, years passed, going
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each one a little quicker than the last. And Harriett was
thirty-nine (hf, 99) . . . There was one chance for her in a
hundred if they had Sir James Pargeter: one chance (hf, 100–
101) . . . she had died in agony, so that she, Harriett, might
keep her hundred pounds (hf, 107) . . . She was forty-five,
her face was lined and pitted and her hair was dust colour,
streaked with gray (hf, 119) . . . ‘Whatever happens to Beatie
he must have his sweetbread, and his soup at eleven and his
tea at five in the morning’ (hf, 130) . . . Fifty-five. Sixty. In
her sixty-second year Harriett had her first bad illness (hf,
161) . . . The years passed: the sixty-third, sixty-fourth; sixty-
fifth; their monotony mitigated by long spells of torpor and
the sheer rapidity of time (hf, 173) . . . Three more years.
Harriett was sixty-eight (hf, 176).

Words here shrivel down to numbers, which threaten reciprocally

to swell uncontrollably beyond the constraining powers of verbal
language.

Continuity and Discontinuity

The modern world experiences itself in terms of speed and flux, of a
glissade that outruns perception. But modernity is also, coincidentally
and consequentially, a matter of measurement. This is often repre-
sented as a conflict between the quality of ‘pure’ movement, an-
nounced (Bergson) and denounced (Wyndham Lewis) throughout
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modern literature and culture, and efforts to measure and calibrate

that movement. In fact, as with many dichotomies, these two alter-
natives provoke and perpetuate each other. Modernity is expressed
and experienced as fluent speed, to be sure; but it is also embodied
and epitomized in the speedometer – a word that is recorded in print
for the first time in The Times in 1904, offering this instrument as an
optional extra on the Ford Model T, first produced in 1908. Modern
thinking is toned and textured by the pull between quality and
quantity, intensity and measure – in short, between the continuous
and the discontinuous. We might associate the speedometer, as
emblematic modernist device, with the switch, which gave to the
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modern world its characteristic capacity for abrupt and absolute

transitions between on and off, slow and fast. It is striking that
Samuel Beckett, who had devoted so much attention in his work to
slow diminishments and gradual fadings out, should have left, as
the final words of the last play he ever completed, ‘Make sense who
may. I switch off.’41
This tension between continuity and discontinuity expresses
itself in a heightened awareness of the defining role of scale in
resolving molecular or corpuscular aggregates into lines or series.
We might pause to recall what Michel Serres repeatedly notes, that
the derivation of tension and allied words like tone and tune is uncer-
tain: perhaps from teino, to stretch, but perhaps also from temno, to
cut or dissect. The same ambiguity attaches to the word rhythm,
which comes from the Greek rhein, meaning to flow, even as rhythm
is precisely that which chops duration into measures.42 Modernist
movement quakes with these tremors of minimality. Beneath or
within the blur of persistence of vision, there is the ‘dynamite of the
tenth of a second’, splitting or parcelling out every apparent con-
tinuity.43 We may note, as a prelude to the ideas laid out here, the
primal preoccupation of cinema with the fact of explosion. Moving
image was not just employed to analyse into their components the
gestures and movements of human bodies, it was also employed to
restore or rearticulate the temporal contour of an action that seemed
to consist of nothing but dissolution.
Leopold Bloom puzzles over one version of this dichotomy in
the Sirens episode of Ulysses.
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Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multi-
plied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations: chords
those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you
like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to
that. Symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn’t see my
mourning. Callous: all for his own gut. Musemathematics.
And you think you’re listening to the etherial. But suppose
you said it like: Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive
thousand. Fall quite flat. It’s on account of the sounds it is.44

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Students continue to call this kind of thing ‘stream of consciousness’

and to be subject to head-shaking reproof for it; for, with Bloom
indeed, there is very little quality of the stream, with his typically
staccato shunts of thought from one idea to the next, sometimes
juddering forward along a more or less intelligible straight line,
sometimes swerving aside, as in the sudden reflections on Richie
Goulding’s purblind appetite. Perhaps the only example of stream-
ing in his choppy discourse is the coinage ‘Musemathematics’, and
even this lacks the collideorscape inventiveness of many of Joyce’s
later word-blends. ‘Musemathematics’ is a slight improvement on
‘mathematical music’, since it seems to activate the idea of musing,
anticipating the ‘museyroom’ of Finnegans Wake, but the improve-
ment is minimal.45 The word wobbles a little between the singular
of ‘music’ and the plural of ‘mathematics’, recalling the slight
incongruity of the phrase ‘Numbers it is,’ an incongruity precisely
of what is known grammatically as ‘number’.
Indeed, we might view all the ‘music’ of the ‘Sirens’ episode as
the kind of mathematization about which Bloom speculates here,
involving as it does the addition, subtraction and transposition of
letters and words, considered as quanta. ‘Sirens’ is full of lyric
lengthenings of vowels which may appear to make the words croon
and yearn (‘Seabloom, greaseabloom’), but it also has reduction to
musical elements, like the scale picked out in relaying the actions of
the deaf waiter: ‘Bald deaf Pat brought quite flat pad ink. Pat set with
ink pen quite flat pad. Pat took plate dish knife fork. Pat went.’46 At
times, the writing of the chapter itself seems to adopt Bloom’s math-
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ematical reading of music, in which the mimicry of musical form

actually bleaches out musical effect from the words, which are
reduced to what Garrett Stewart has called ‘alphabetic integers’.47 In
this respect, the chapter itself can seem as tone-deaf as Pat the waiter.
An example would be Anthony Burgess’s reading of the phrase
‘Blmstdp’ for ‘Bloom stood up’ as a mimicry of a ‘hollow fifth’, a
chord in which the thirds are suppressed.48 This identification
benefits from the mathematical pun which makes the (notoriously
ugly or unmusical) fifth the result of the removal of the vowels, of
which there are five, both because there are five vowels and because
five of them (o, o, o, o, u) have been removed.
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But we should note that Bloom’s musings go in opposite direc-

tions. ‘Numbers it is. All music when you come to think’ could mean
both ‘Music is just a matter of numbers when it comes down to it,’
or the more Pythagorean ‘all mathematical relations are a kind of
music.’ The reference to ‘the etherial’ might also evoke Pythagoras,
as well as the coalescence of matter and movement in the magical,
all-pervading pseudo-substance the ether, which Lord Salisbury, in
an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science,
described as ‘the substantive case of the verb “to undulate”’.49
Bloom’s apprehension of music as mathematics is embodied in
the bit of apparatus that, elsewhere in Ulysses, Ned Lambert demon-
strates for indicating which turn is on in the music hall. Joyce re-
minds us of this apparatus in a wonderful conjoining of letters and
numbers, as we briefly glimpse Blazes Boylan’s secretary putting
aside her book at work:

Miss Dunne hid the Capel street library copy of The Woman
in White far back in her drawer and rolled a sheet of gaudy
notepaper into her typewriter.
Too much mystery business in it. Is he in love with that
one, Marion? Change it and get another by Mary Cecil Haye.
The disk shot down the groove, wobbled a while, ceased
and ogled them: six.
Miss Dunne clicked on the keyboard:
— 16 June 1904.
Five tallwhitehatted sandwichmen between Monypeny’s
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corner and the slab where Wolfe Tone’s statue was not, eeled
themselves turning h. e. l. y.’s and plodded back as they
had come.50

Bloom’s mathematical musings recall Helmholtz’s demonstra-

tions of the compound nature of sound vibrations in On the Sensations
of Tone, and come at the end of a long period of reflections on the
atomistic components of composite forms.51 The nineteenth century
had seen the invention and popularization of the idea of the math-
ematical curve, in the characteristic bell shape of Gaussian or normal
distribution. More generally, it had made familiar the idea that the
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movement or transmission of messages or information was most

conveniently effected by decomposing and then reassembling the in-
formation to be transmitted. The ideal of maximal convertibility and
maximum communicability developed in the nineteenth century –
which might be seen as an ideal of maximal continuity, or minimized
discontinuity – required the intervention of a discontinuous medium.
We have become used to the observation that the séance and later on
the telepathic soirée were a kind of parallel to technological forms of
transmission like the telegraph, for they employed precisely the same
logic of decomposition followed by synthesis. Table-rapping was a
sort of slow typewriting. In this sense, all the allegedly analogue tech-
nologies of the nineteenth century were in fact digital, or protodigital,
in that they involved the translation of a continuously variable wave
into a discontinuous set of variations. The epitome of the protodigital
medium was the cinema, with its dramatic slicing and dicing into the
continuity of the visible for the purposes of capturing and reproduc-
ing motion. The most widespread digital code in the nineteenth cen-
tury was Morse, which makes its appearance in Ulysses in Stephen’s
evocation of the dog on the shore of Sandymount: ‘His snout lifted
barked at the wavenoise, herds of seamorse. They serpented towards
his feet, curling, unfurling many crests, every ninth, breaking, plash-
ing, from far, from farther out, waves and waves.’52 The passage
indicates not only the oscillations of position that make up each
individual wave, but also, at a higher level, the alternating current of
the waves, which allows them to be distinguished and enumerated.
These are oscillations that are not only measurable as number, but
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oscillations in and out of the condition of number.

Zeno
A simple way of summarizing this concern is to say that modernity
encounters in a series of strikingly practical ways the paradoxes of
Zeno regarding movement. In accounts of modernism, Bergson has
carried the day against Zeno. This is partly because the Bergsonian
critique of the conjoined values of calculation, quantity and intellect
and his correlative praise of pure becoming have become sovereign
in our ways of thinking about art and its relation to time and meaning.
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The time philosophy of Bergson drew together into one current the
preference for the power of intuition, which was able to apprehend
the complex persistingness in fluidity and fluidity in persistingness
of things over the power of intellect, which was said to divide the
world up into static objects. Bertrand Russell characterizes this
attitude neatly and tartly in his essay ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’
of 1912: ‘Thus logic and mathematics do not represent a positive
spiritual effort . . . but mere somnambulism, in which the will is sus-
pended, and the mind is no longer active. Incapacity for mathematics
is therefore a sign of grace – fortunately a very common one.’53 We
have taught ourselves to prefer motion conceived, not as the magical
and, for Zeno, inconceivable passage from one fixed condition to
another, but as the pulsive current of becoming, in which nothing
is ever entirely left behind, and all is a continuous commingling of
retention and protention.
For Bergson, the force of ‘life’ was not only immeasurable, it was
also inexhaustible. This was good news for the Allies in the First
World War, who, Bergson assured his readers in 1914, were fighting
an enemy fuelled only by its own barbarous mechanism, whereas the
Allies were on the undefeatable side of life: ‘to the force which feeds
only on its own brutality we are opposing that which seeks outside
and above itself a principle of life and renovation. While the one is
gradually spending itself, the other is continually remaking itself.’54
It is not just that Germany would gradually run out of nitrates and
international credit; it is that it had blunderingly elected to measure
itself by measurability itself.
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Measurability, and in particular the infinite divisibility proposed

in Zeno’s paradoxes, belongs to an order of discontinuity to which
Bergson opposes an absolute continuity. Ultimately Bergson’s op-
ponent is divisibility itself. To a world of distinct objects, Bergson
opposes a world of unresting energies and commingled vibrations.
The distinction between two colours is a distinction between two
frequencies, which seems absolute only because of ‘the narrow
duration into which are contracted the billions of vibrations which
they execute in one of our moments’.55 Slow down our perceptions
so that we can ‘live it out at a slower rhythm’,56 and we are synchro-
nized with those vibrations, and the colours blur together, or become
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simply vibrations, as when one pushes one’s nose right up to a Seurat

or a pixellated video screen, a kind of experience which, oddly
enough, Bergson refers to, not as pure quantity, but as ‘quality itself ’,
the blending of sensation and perception.57 Like many others,
Bergson finds in the new physics, and especially particle physics, a
contradiction of the fundamental discontinuity in nature announced
by Democritus, in his announcement that all that exists are atoms
and the spaces between them.

We see force more and more materialized, the atom more

and more idealized, the two terms converging towards a
common limit and the universe thus recovering its continu-
ity . . . the nearer we draw to the ultimate elements of matter
the better we note the vanishing of that discontinuity which
our senses perceived on the surface.58

Bergsonism amounts to the demand for ‘the idea of an universal

continuity’ – the smooth enjambment effected by that ‘n’ before ‘uni-
versal’ being a bit of phono-philosophical confirmation offered by
Bergson’s translators.59 The same actions of magnification and de-
celeration are involved in Walter Benjamin’s decimal and decimating
dynamite, the effect of which was to explode the seeming integrity
of forms. Dance and music provide Bergson with examples absolute
continuity, in which before and after are indisseverable:

If jerky movements are wanting in grace, the reason is that

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each of them is self-sufficient and does not announce those

which are to follow. If curves are more graceful than broken
lines, the reason is that, while a curved line changes its
direction at every moment, every new direction is indicated
in the preceding one. Thus the perception of ease in motion
passes over into the pleasure of mastering the flow of time
and of holding the future in the present.60

At the end of the third chapter of his Creative Evolution, Bergson

provides us with an image of the movement of history, as an
immense and all-inclusive push of life through matter:
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As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire

solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided move-
ment of descent which is materiality itself, so all organized
beings, from the humblest to the highest, from the first
origins of life to the time in which we are, and in all places
as in all times, do but evidence a single impulsion, the in-
verse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All
the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremen-
dous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man
bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and
in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before
and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to
beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable
obstacles, perhaps even death.61

Bertrand Russell comments sourly on this passage that

a cool critic, who feels himself a mere spectator, perhaps an

unsympathetic spectator, of the charge in which man is
mounted upon animality, may be inclined to think that calm
and careful thought is hardly compatible with this form of
exercise. When he is told that thought is a mere means of
action, the mere impulse to avoid obstacles in the field, he
may feel that such a view is becoming in a cavalry officer, but
not in a philosopher, whose business, after all, is with
thought.62
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For Bergson, intellect does violence to the world by fragmenting

it; for Russell, Bergsonian intuition does violence to the world by
forcing distinctness into unity, cramming multiplicity together into
an imperious, expanding One. This would in fact be the result of
Bergson’s absolute continuity without discontinuity, in which time
only ever thickened. Without the possibility of discontinuity, in fact,
without the numerable divisions insisted on by Zeno, there would
be continuity, but no movement; there would be, we may suppose,
movement, but no internal spacing or differentiation, no movement
away, no self-distancing of time, which could therefore do no more
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than convolute and coagulate, like the weirdly smeared state of mat-
ter known as the Bose–Einstein condensate, occurring at tempera-
tures close to zero, that was predicted in 1924–5 and experimentally
produced in 1995.63
There is no absolute discontinuity between continuity and dis-
continuity. Zeno shows, not that movement is impossible, but rather
that it may not be possible to make movement fully intelligible. He
is right, not because there is no movement, but because movement
is not intelligible without dependence on a principle of discontinuity
that seems to make it impossible. The problem posed by the Eleatic
paradoxes is not how to explain movement, but how to explain the
fact that movement has these two incompatible but indispensable
dimensions, one merely aggregative, the other integral. Perhaps the
reason why the mind is so exercised by the question of motion is
because, in considering it, it must itself alternate, itself thus ‘mined
with a motion’, between the plenitude of the continuous and the
ration of the discontinuous.64 Readings of the paradoxes like Berg-
son’s are an attempt to create an absolute discontinuity between the
discontinuity of intellect and the continuity revealed to intuition.
Meanwhile the conditions of modern life continued to confirm the
existence of Zeno’s paradox, confirming that there was in fact no
discontinuity between continuity and discontinuity.

Alternating Currents
Continuity and discontinuity are the two polarities between which
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much modern writing alternates. Indeed, we might say that this is

enacted in the principle of alternation itself, as it became more and
more apparent in the machineries of the modern world. This is the
period in which the concepts of periodicity and frequency enter
powerfully, if also subliminally, into general awareness, uniting the
discontinuous and the continuous at a higher level, since, in the
repeating wave, the continuously variable curve forms a series of
distinguishable oscillations. The movements of modernism are as
much pulsations as propulsions. They are also movements of active,
but immobile, agitation. In a sense, modernity comes into being with
the defeat of Thomas Edison’s direct current system of electricity and
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the adoption of the Tesla–Westinghouse system of alternating

current. From now on, vectors would be indissolubly joined to oscil-
lations, those inner atoms, or elementary particles of movement.
Modern movement was the movement of fans, flywheels, propellers,
dynamos, escalators, revolving doors (patented by Theophilus van
Kannel in 1888) and rotary engines of all kinds, Gatling guns,
cranked cameras and projectors, the tank, which propelled itself
forward by means of repeated rotations of a single repeating loop,
and helical instruments such as the phonograph and, later, the
tape recorder. Their operation brought into being a whole new din-
ning tinnitus of sounds – hummings, whirrings, rattlings, hissings,
whizzings and buzzings. Cinema turned the binary alternations of
instruments like the thaumatrope into a progressive form, but this
happened by degrees, and Lynda Nead has observed how common it
was for early films, especially striptease films, to be shown repeatedly
backwards and forwards.65
If it is true that modernism has a defining attraction to the con-
tinuously varying waveform and indeed to curves of all kinds, it is
also often drawn to the exposure of the blocky elements of those
curves, through slowings or close-ups that reveal the elements of
which they are aggregated. Garrett Stewart has pointed to what he
calls the ‘flicker effect’ of modernism, in which the spool seems to
get caught or to judder, suddenly revealing the individual com-
ponents of which film or narrative is composed, moments at which
the numberless becomes suddenly numerable.66 A literary parallel to
this is to be found in Conrad’s The Secret Agent, in which we read of
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Winnie Verloc’s perplexity at the fact that her mother suddenly starts
spending half-crowns and five shillingses on cab fares. Her mother’s
unaccustomed ‘mania for locomotion’ is explained when she reveals
that she has secured new accommodation in an almshouse ‘founded
by a wealthy innkeeper for the destitute widows of the trade’.67
Conrad renders her last cab journey as an extraordinary kind of
agitation on the spot:

In the narrow streets the progress of the journey was made

sensible to those within by the near fronts of the houses glid-
ing past slowly and shakily, with a great rattle and jingling
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of glass, as if about to collapse behind the cab; and the in-

firm horse, with the harness hung over his sharp backbone
flapping very loose about his thighs, appeared to be dancing
mincingly on his toes with infinite patience. Later on, in the
wider space of Whitehall, all visual evidences of motion
became imperceptible. The rattle and jingle of glass went on
indefinitely in front of the long Treasury building – and time
itself seemed to stand still.68

Telling
A writer is often most palpably and painfully quartered between
quantity and quality during the process of writing. Even before the
days of automatic word counts, writers were driven to keep the count
on what they are writing, in words, paragraphs, chapters and pages,
and later print runs, sales figures and revenues, for all that they
might struggle to forge more fluent and organic forms of unity. Few
writers have documented this process as evocatively as Virginia
Woolf in her diaries, the diary being a form of writing which is cast
between the uncaring ordinality of the clock and the more fluctuant
and approximate graphings of thought and feeling. There is a some-
times bathetic counterpoint in Woolf ’s diaries between the attempts
to capture fleeting insights and state of feeling and the rendering of
calendrical accounts, through the recording of times, dates, birth-
days. She begins her first entry for 1919 explaining that she is re-
stricted by a hand injury to one hour’s writing a day, but that ‘having
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hoarded it this morning I may spend part of it now, since L. is out

and I am much behindhand with the month of January.’69 With her
37th birthday a few days away, on 25 January 1919, she imagines what
will be her attitude at the age of fifty to what she will find written
there: ‘If Virginia Woolf at the age of 50, when she sits down to build
her memoirs out of these books, is unable to make a phrase as it
should be made, I can only condole with her’ (wd, 17). She under-
takes, for the benefit of the ‘elderly lady’ (wd, 17) she will be at fifty,
to provide a full account of her friends, their achievements and a
forecast of their future works, concluding that ‘The lady of 50 will
be able to say how near to the truth I come; but I have written enough
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for tonight (only 15 minutes I see)’ (wd, 18). A week short of thirteen
years later, with The Waves behind her and her fiftieth birthday in sight,
Woolf parcelled out for herself, alas too generously, a prospectus of
the two decades of work still in front of her:

I shall be fifty on 25th, Monday week that is: and sometimes

I feel I have lived 250 years already, and sometimes that I am
still the youngest person on the omnibus (Nessa says that
she still always thinks this as she sits down.) And I want to
write another four novels: Waves, I mean; and The Tap on the
Door; and to go through English literature like a string
through cheese, or rather like some industrious insect, eat-
ing its way from book to book, from Chaucer to Lawrence.
This is a programme, considering my slowness, and how I
get slower, thicker, more intolerant of the fling and the rush,
to last out my 20 years, if I have them. (wd, 174)

There are interferences in these periodic cycles; later, she notes

that it would have been her father’s 96th birthday, and that if he were
still alive she would never have written anything. Even her mood is
given an implicit calibration, with her references to the fluctuations
of her ‘spiritual temperature’ (wd, 265). While she was writing, she
oscillated between the desire for fluency, or continuity, and the desire
for a kind of compacted integrity. Her sense of the book she is writ-
ing is alternately light, floating, fluent, dashing and then ‘tense and
packed’,70 ‘a hard muscular book’ (wd, 102). Time and again, she
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speaks of her desire to smooth out ‘chop and change’,71 to create a

kind of unity. These two conditions are imaged in the move from
handwriting to typescript. She struggles to find the right kind of
composite image for her own composition. Often, this image is of
some entity made up of oscillation itself, for example The Moths, the
idea of which ‘hovers somewhere at the back of my brain’ (wd, 131).
The title of the book itself shuttles for a few weeks between The Moths
and The Waves, which we can read as a kind of alternation between
different alternating frequencies, the rapid whirr of the moth’s wing,
and the slow, booming or thudding pulse of the waves – in ‘the
concussion of the waves breaking . . . with muffled thuds, like logs falling, on
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the shore’.72 Throughout the diaries, the activity of thought is ren-

dered in the quasi-mechanical whirrings and flutterings of insects:
‘The mind is the most capricious of insects – flitting, fluttering’ (wd,
124). Woolf strives to achieve fluency, but also is brought repeatedly
to the recognition that this continuity is only achievable against the
background of resistance formed by the steady whittlings of the
clock: ‘I find myself in the old driving whirlwind of writing against
time. Have I ever written with it?’ (wd, 127). This sensation of
mobility achieved against resistance precipitates a marvellous, self-
referring image of rooks suspended, windhover- or angel-like, in
the blustery air:

I have to watch the rooks beating up against the wind, which

is high, and still I say to myself instinctively, ‘What’s the
phrase for that?’ and try to make more and more vivid the
roughness of the air current and the tremor of the rook’s
wing slicing as if the air were full of ridges and ripples and
roughness. They rise and sink, up and down, as if the exer-
cise rubbed and braced them like swimmers in rough water.
(wd, 131)

Woolf ’s diaries are full of actions of counting up, counting out

and counting off, and they provide an energizing metre throughout
her novels too. There is Susan in The Waves grimly counting down
the days to the end of the school term: ‘I count each step as I mount,
counting each step something done with. So each night I tear off the
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old day from the calendar, and screw it tight into a ball.’73 Then there
is the tense counting-off of the seconds to track the progress of the
German air raid in The Years, in the passage from which I quoted
earlier:

Nicholas looked at his watch as if he were timing the guns.

There was something queer about him, Eleanor thought;
medical, priestly? He wore a seal that hung down from his
watch-chain. The number on the box opposite was 1397. She
noticed everything. The Germans must be overhead now.
She felt a curious heaviness on top of her head. One, two,
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three, four, she counted, looking up at the greenish-grey

stone. Then there was a violent crack of sound, like the split
of lightning in the sky. The spider’s web oscillated.
‘On top of us,’ said Nicholas, looking up. They all looked
up . . .
One, two, three four, Eleanor counted. The spider’s web
was swaying. That stone may fall, she thought, fixing a
certain stone with her eyes. Then a gun boomed again. It was
fainter – further away.
‘That’s over,’ said Nicholas. He shut his watch with a
click.74

As Joyce’s washerwomen in ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ assert, ‘every

telling has a taling,’ and there is no writer in whose work the actions
of narration and numeration are more entrained with each other than
Samuel Beckett. Molloy’s account of his laborious communication
with his deaf and blind mother brings together sequence and
repetition, cardinality and ordinality, in telling fashion:

I got into communication with her by rapping on her skull.

One knock meant yes, two no, three I don’t know, four,
money, five goodbye. I was hard put to it to ram this code
into her ruined and frantic understanding, but I did it in the
end. That she should confuse yes, no, I don’t know and
goodbye were all the same to me, I confused them myself.
But that she should associate the four knocks with anything
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else but money was to be avoided at all costs. During the

period of training therefore, as I administered the four
knocks to her skull, I would stuff a banknote under her nose,
or in her mouth. In the innocence of my heart. For she
seemed to have lost, if not all notion of mensuration, at least
the capacity of counting beyond two. It was too far for her.
The distance was too great from one to four. By the time she
reached the fourth knock she imagined she was still at the
second, the first two having been erased from her memory
as completely as though they had never been felt.75

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The counterposed orders of narrative and re-counting, of narra-

tive and counting, here give the passage its characteristically synco-
pated movement. The fling and lingering of the writing are cross-cut
with the table-rapping of the séance and the clopping of Clever
Hans’s hooves. We can perhaps think of the knocking on Mag’s skull
as the whirrings of Woolf ’s inspirational moths or waves slowed
down to a frequency at which the cycles become countable. Just
when it appears we are about to be allowed to break out of Mag’s
own autistic binarism, and the unintelligible knockings and bang-
ings are about to build into a kind of narrative durée, we are dragged
back to the order of elementary bodily percussion – the solution to
Molloy’s difficulty being not the invention of another code, but the
simple amplification of the old one:

I looked for and finally found a more effective way of putting

the idea of money into her head. This consisted in replacing
the four knocks of my index knuckle by one or more (accord-
ing to my needs) thumps of the fist, on her skull. That she
understood.76

Like the fabled monoglot Englishman whose method of getting a

foreigner to understand him is to Speak More Loudly, this is the
introversion of sense (in the double French sense of meaning and
direction), the turning of movement on and into itself, to form a
standing wave, a thrumming, mobile matter of pure pulsation.
Mathematics, and in particular number, are therefore far from
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being the adversaries of grace and intuition, are in fact levers and
accelerators of the modernist evocations of speed, flux and the desire
for ‘universal continuity’.77 Number is important because it forms
part of the alternation between orders of magnitude and the
principles of continuity and discontinuity, melody and percussion,
principles which come together in the heightened awareness of
states of flicker, fluctuation and alternation, and in a focus on the
atomistic divisibility of forms of modern movement, depending as
they often do on mechanical operations involving multitudinous but
innumerable repeated processes. Modernist movement is mathem-
atized: in it, matter is riddled with motion and motion condensed
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and accelerated into a tensely tremulous kind of matter. Modernity

may be characterized by the multiplicity of the gearing mechanisms
needed to effect these transpositions between levels, scales and
ratios. The epistemological apparatus required for this might be
given the same name as that invented at the beginning of his career by
the poet, Marxist literary critic and sometime engineer Christopher
Caudwell – the automatic infinitely variable gear.78
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Lots

‘Mony a mickle’, tradition and consonance between them assure us,

‘maks a muckle.’ ‘Maks’, or ‘mak’? The point at which singular
becomes plural or plural becomes singular will be the point of this
chapter, which will be concerned with the characteristics of what
may be called the ‘quasi-choate’. Lots of little things make up a lot.
Most languages abound in words for these bundled abundances,
these muchnesses. It is a necessary characteristic of such aggregate
terms that they are defined vaguely, in terms of more or less, rather
than precise quantities. But this is by no means to say that they are
not numerical, for the intuition of number will have a great deal to
do with their definition and use.
Sometimes these aggregate-terms harden into quasi-units of
measurement. We frequently hear nowadays of a ‘shed load’ of
something, usually meaning an impressively and unexpectedly large
amount, often of some undesired or unwelcome commodity. The
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term was originally employed, and is still sometimes so employed,

to refer to the contents of a lorry that have been accidentally spilled,
or ‘shed’, on to a road. More and more, however, one senses that the
people using the expression see the shed as an adjectival noun rather
than a past participle, indicating a certain volume of material, that
is, as much as could be contained within a typical garden shed. This
in its turn vaguely summons up images of sheds being towed up and
down the motorway system, occasionally disgorging their cargoes
of trowels, garden gnomes and hosepipes. The subsequent mutation
of ‘shed load’ into ‘shit load’ is perhaps assisted by the fact that
excrement tends to occur in piles or heaps, which, though they vary
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considerably, share the characteristic that there is usually too much

of them, or more of them than is needed.
We may think of these terms as vague, but the imprecise
quantities or arrangements they name can in fact be quite precisely
delineated. Language exhibits surprising nuances when it comes to
distinguishing between different kinds of aggregate. A nuance, after
all, is a shading or a clouding; though a cloud is itself a more-or-less
aggregate, there are so many different kinds of cloud that, until the
systems for grouping and distinguishing them were developed at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, they might have appeared as
the figure of crowding itself. A heap, for instance, is usually thought
of as both bigger and less organized than a pile, since piled things
are more regular in their construction than heaps. Piles have been
piled: heaps may come into being spontaneously. So dirty laundry
comes in heaps rather than piles – a pile of shirts would have to be
folded neatly, and a pile of anything is likely to consist of examples
of the same class of thing. There is a certain zone of overlap where
a pile of objects can reasonably also be referred to as a heap, though
the larger and less defined the pile, the more likely it is to be thought
of as a heap. One can have a heap of sand or sawdust, but not a pile,
which would suggest some magical work of magnetism or levitation.
For something to be orderly in construction, the units of which it is
made up need to be visible and divisible. Size here is therefore to be
correlated with countability. A pile is broadly equivalent in British
English to a bunch, which equally will tend to consist of a number
of distinguishable elements – as in a bunch of flowers, keys or coco-
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nuts. In American English, by contrast, ‘bunch’ seems to have lost

the necessary suggestion of numerable plurality: ‘a bunch of stuff ’
sounds odder to British ears than to American. When Francis Galton
and others set about measuring the number of shocks that a railway
passenger could expect to receive during the course of a journey, the
word ‘shock’ might just have retained a little of its original meaning
of a sheaf (as in ‘a shock of red hair’). The individuated shocks of
the train on the rail may have seemed to have something in them of
the singular-multiple. A ‘lump’ stands in the same relation to a ‘mass’
as ‘pile’ does to ‘heap’, that is, it seems more compact and choate. A
‘mass’ of inflamed tissue may be relatively small, smaller than a lump
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under some circumstances, but a mass nevertheless always suggests

a vaguer, less determinate kind of magnitude. This is why a knot of
people is smaller than a mass of people, for a knot has a defined form,
with a clear edge between its inside and its outside, while a mass
suggests not just something whose volume is undefined, but some-
thing that is in the process of amassing, or is like to engorge. Masses
are not just massive, but massing.
Language seems particularly good at making units out of aggre-
gated multiplicities. In such concepts, in which language abounds,
words and numbers intersect and interact in surprisingly intricate
ways. One may see this typified in the expression ‘a certain number’.
The number here cannot be referred to exactly, because the actual or
precise number is not known, but it can be acted on and transacted
with. It is certain that some particular number or other must be
implied, if not specifically meant, by ‘a certain number’, even though
that number may never emerge. The ‘certain number’ of which a
group, a crowd, a swarm, a mass, a multitude are (is) made is certainly
some number, though it is uncertain which.
The class of ancient philosophical conundrums known as sorites
paradoxes trade on the fact that in aggregates like heaps, certainty
and uncertainty are compounded. In the most famous sorites para-
dox, propounded by Eubulides of Miletus, the following chain of
reasoning is offered. If a heap of grain consists in a large but inde-
terminate number of grains, the removal of one grain can never be
enough to cause the heap to be anything less or other than a heap.
We may in fact say that it is part of the definition of a heap, as a
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roughly defined aggregate, that it should have this characteristic.

Something to which the removal of a single grain would make such
a difference could not plausibly be described as a heap. So, to be
essentially a heap, a heap must be only more-or-less a heap. And yet,
if one grain is repeatedly removed, there will in fact come a point –
the point at which there is only a handful of grains left, or perhaps
only one, or perhaps even none at all – when the heap will in fact
have ceased to be recognizable as a heap. Since it is the removal of
the grains one by one that makes the difference, there ought to be a
point at which the heap ceases to be a heap – yet it is impossible to
specify quite what that point is, if it is really true that the removal of
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one grain can never make that much difference. The paradox can be
run the other way round. If adding one grain will never suffice to
make something a heap, then there is no point at which 1 + 1 + 1 + 1
. . . individual grains will ever definitively tip over into being a heap.
This is the form of the paradox to which Samuel Beckett alludes in
Endgame: ‘Moment upon moment, pattering down like the millet
grains of . . . that old Greek. And all life long you wait for that to
amount to a life.’1
These questions bear on the force in language and thought of
what I will call the imagination of multitude. Multitude must always
in fact be imaginary. In the Old Testament, multitude often seems to
carry the intimation of unlimited bounty; multitudinousness is a
promise. The word first appears in Genesis, in the promise made to
Hagar, who has fled from her mistress Sara, bearing Abraham’s
child: ‘And the angel of the lord said unto her, I will multiply thy
seed exceedingly, that it shall not be numbered for multitude’ (Gen-
esis 16:10). Jacob alleges of the Lord that he has said ‘I will surely do
thee good, and make thy seed as the sand of the sea, which cannot
be numbered for multitude’ (32:12). In Deuteronomy, the Lord says
‘the lord your God hath multiplied you, and, behold, ye are this day
as the stars of heaven for multitude’ (Deuteronomy 1:10), and the
formula ‘as the stars of heaven’ is repeated twice more in the book.
In Judges, we read that ‘the Midianites and the Amalekites and all
the children of the east lay along in the valley like grasshoppers for
multitude; and their camels were without number, as the sand by the
sea side for multitude’ (Judges 7:12). The phrase ‘it shall not be num-
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bered for multitude’ is a pleasing contrivance. We could say it means:

the number of items is so large that one cannot attain to it through
numbering. Multitude of this kind is not at all outside the order of
number; in fact it is its numerousness and nothing but its numer-
ousness, the fact that there are so many numbers on the way to its
number, that stands in the way of assigning it its correct number.
The word ‘multitude’ seems to undergo a change of magnitude
between the Old and New Testaments, as it moves from the cosmos
to the polis. In the New Testament, the multitude is often a crowd –
‘the whole multitude sought to touch him’ (Luke 6:19); ‘an innumer-
able multitude of people, insomuch that they trode one upon another’
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(Luke 12:1); even the disciples are a ‘whole multitude’ (Luke 19:37).
Multitude is no longer exorbitant on a cosmic scale. Even in Revela-
tion, the ‘great multitude, which no man could number’ is ‘of all
nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues’ (Revelation 7:9),

πολύς ὃν ἀριθμῆσαι αὐτὸν οὐδεὶς ἐδύνατο’. In Revelation 19:6, there

‘great multitude, which no man could number’ translating ‘ὄχλος

is a more impersonal ‘voice of a great multitude [again, ὄχλου

πολλοῦ], and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty
thunderings’, but the fact that this is a voice that nevertheless
coheres into an utterance – ‘saying, Alleluia: for the Lord God
omnipotent reigneth’ – reins in its grandeur.
To imagine a multitude is to imagine something not fully
imaginable, a singularity formed of pure multiplicity. A multitude is
a finite indefinite, precisely because it must be a multiplicity of some
distinguishable and reckonable kind of thing. We do not usually
mean by a multitude a pure multiplicity, of huge numbers of different
kinds of thing. A multitude both is and is not countable. It is a plural-
ity of things that goes beyond counting, but nevertheless must con-
sist of things that are in principle countable, things that can be
counted as ones of something – loaves, fishes, stars, grains of sand.
A multitude is a piece of implicit or deferred numeration, not that
which is beyond number, or outside the order of number, but a kind
of innumerable number, like an unspeakable word. There are many
kinds and degrees of multitude. We might even say that there is an
infinity of different multitudes, though multitudes themselves are
not and cannot be infinite, because they must add up to some
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unknown quantity, some countable, but uncounted number. A

multitude is a kind of x, an algebraic placeholder.
As such, the word ‘multitude’ has an implicit reference to the
intersection of words and numbers. It is a word standing in for an
unspecified, unspoken number, or even for a particular, subjunctive
feeling relating to that sense of a number. One example of the spec-
trum of feelings that may be associated with the idea of multitude
may be what W. B. Yeats describes as ‘the emotion of multitude’. In
an essay of that name of 1903, Yeats laments its absence from the
‘clear and logical construction’ of French drama, contrasting it with
Greek drama, which
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has got the emotion of multitude from its chorus, which

called up famous sorrows, long-leaguered Troy, much-
enduring Odysseus, and all the gods and heroes to witness,
as it were, some well-ordered fable, some action separated
but for this from all but itself.2

Often, this feeling is provoked by the recognition that ‘the sub-plot

is the main plot working itself out in more ordinary men and women,
and so doubly calling up before us the image of multitude’.3 Yeats’s
phrase ‘emotion of multitude’ is more exact than it may at first
appear. It would be easy to see Yeats as writing simply in praise of
Celtic blur here, of ‘vague symbols that set the mind wandering from
idea to idea, emotion to emotion’.4 But it is not just the slide from
emotion to emotion that Yeats refers to but a more exact and
emphatic singular: the emotion of multitude, emotion centred on
and responsive to the fact of multitude itself.
Immanuel Kant’s reflections on the mathematical sublime pro-
vide us with a way of considering this interference of the numbered
and the unnumbered. Kant distinguishes the capacity of reason, as
exemplified in mathematical thinking, to think to infinity and, so to
speak, beyond – this he calls ‘apprehension’ (Auffassung) – from the
aesthetic capacity of the mind to grasp the magnitude as a whole, or
a Zusammenfassung (comprehension):

Apprehension presents no difficulty: for this process can be

carried on ad infinitum; but with the advance of apprehension,
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comprehension becomes more difficult at every step and

soon attains its maximum, and this is the aesthetically great-
est fundamental measure for the estimation of magnitude.5

Kant asks us to think of a spectator of a pyramid or of St

Peter’s in Rome who is standing too close to take in the whole at a
glance. Kant says that this produces first a kind of striving to
overcome the limit on the synthesizing imagination, and then a kind
of disappointed recoil – which nevertheless produces a kind of
satisfaction:

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here a feeling comes home to him of the inadequacy of his

imagination for presenting the idea of a whole within which
that imagination attains its maximum, and, in its fruitless
efforts to extend this limit, recoils upon itself, but in so
doing succumbs to an emotional delight.6

Thus it is that, as Kant puts it, ‘that same inability on the part of
our faculty for the estimation of the magnitude of things of the world
of the senses to attain to the idea, is the awakening of a feeling of a
supersensible faculty within us.’7 As Andrzej Warminski describes
it, this turns an incapacity into a paradoxical kind of ‘faculty’. We
may say that the imagination of multitude encompasses a similar
movement of the mind, that somehow captures and folds back on
itself the open capacity of mathematical reasoning.
Kant here seems to complicate fatefully the distinction on which
his analysis depends, between the mathematical and the non-
mathematical. For the satisfaction in disappointment involves a kind
of contusion of his structure, in which the mathematical is used to
form the non-mathematical. The imagination of multitude may be a
result of this same contusion. Kant notices that our powers of relative
observation are greatly increased by various technical devices:

nothing can be given in nature, no matter how great we may

judge it to be, which, regarded in some other relation, may
not be degraded to the level of the infinitely little, and noth-
ing so small which in comparison with some still smaller
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standard may not for our imagination be enlarged to the

greatness of a world. Telescopes have put within our reach
an abundance of material to go upon in making the first
observation, and microscopes the same in making the second.8

This presumably means that the sense of the gap between the
open relativity of apprehension (Auffassung) and the closed absolute-
ness of comprehension (Zusammenfassung) increases. The contem-
porary imagination of multitude colonizes this gap between scales,
which is opened up in many more places by the grasp-exceeding
reach of contemporary instances of multitude.
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This play between number and the innumerable operates with

particular force in the Bible, since its texts, and especially the books
of the Old Testament, are so thronged with number and numeration
– ages, heights, weights and measures of all kinds, counted out in
what can seem like obsessive detail. If a word like ‘multitude’, and
the various words it translates, seems to move language beyond
number, or to use language to move number beyond itself, this is
against a background of careful and systematic coordination of
word and number. If it is characteristic of a sacred text that it evokes
the ineffable and the uncountable, it can also be characterized by a
kind of sacred exactitude and totality. This is encouraged by the
Kabbalistic tradition of gematria (probably derived from Greek
geometria), which assigns numerical values to letters and words and
reads significance into the quantitative rhymes between words and
names. The Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible derives from the
work of the scribes and scholars working between the seventh and
eleventh centuries, who became known for the accuracy of their
techniques. It became common for them to add marginal notes,
known as masorah, which deal with errors and variants, and give
details of vocalization and accentuation. But one of the most import-
ant means of checking the accuracy of texts and stabilizing their
transmission was through counting of letters and the calculation of
word-use statistics.
Counting procedures are important in many religions, but per-
haps particularly so in Judaism, for example in the observance
known as Sefirat HaOmer or Counting of the Omer, which involves
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the counting of the 49 days between the sacrifice of an omer-measure

of barley at Passover and the offering of wheat brought to the temple
at Shavuot, as required by Leviticus:

15. And ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the
day of rest, from the day that ye brought the omer of the
waving; seven weeks shall there be complete;
16. even unto the morrow after the seventh week shall ye
number fifty days; and ye shall present a new meal-offering
unto the lord. (Leviticus 23:15–16)

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If God is beyond measure and numeration, then the apprehen-

sion of God is often regarded as a matter of counting. In Kabbalah,
the En Sof, or infinite principle, reveals itself through ten attributes
or emanations, known as the Sephirot, the plural of Sephirah, mean-
ing counting. These principles are both themselves numbered and
are number, or plurality itself.
Counting out has its complement in the practice of number
divination. Where counting aims to get language and bodily action
to march precisely in step with the operations of number, number
divination exploits the opposite principle, of the blindness to num-
ber, and the capacity of multitude to dazzle or distract. Sieve holes
seem to have a related function in Korean folklore, in which goblins
were thought to be kept at bay with a sieve hung on a gatepost:

People believed that goblins descended and started counting

the tiny holes in the sieve, got confused while counting, and
were forced to recount over and over. When the goblins
heard the roosters crow, they stopped counting the holes,
complained about the imminent sunrise and hurried back
to their abodes in the skies.9

Here the multiplicity of the sieve holes captures or detains the

goblins through the compulsion to count, combined with the
dizzying difficulty of keeping count. It is common in divination
practices for there to be a surrender to a kind of counting procedure
that itself muddles or obscures the count. One interesting piece of
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seventeenth-century folklore seems also to draw on the hypnotic

powers of the sieve. In his Entertainment at Althorp (1603), Ben
Jonson says that the fairy Queen Mab ‘Trains forth midwives in
their slumber/ With a sieve the holes to number’; in Leviathan (1651),
Thomas Hobbes refers to ‘counting holes in a sive’ as one of the
‘Prognostiques of time to come’ and Richard Levin has persuasively
interpreted this as some kind of counting procedure: ‘Probably
one counted the holes while reciting some formula (which may
have named the alternative possibilities) and the answer was
determined by the number of holes, or, more likely, by the end of
the count.’10
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Counting procedures like eeny-meeny-miny-mo depend on a

similar principle of distraction, in which the words, while seeming
themselves to form a count, in fact work to obscure it, succession
concealing summation. A similar work of distraction is also at the
heart of a riddling rhyme like ‘As I was going to St Ives’. The very
name for such playful procedures – riddles – gives a clue to the role
of the uncountable multiplicity in them. Such riddles often have at
their heart plays between nothing and number, for example in
John Lennon’s folkish lyric from ‘A Day in the Life’, which evokes
the task of counting the four thousand holes in Blackburn, and the
eventual satisfaction of knowing how many holes are required to fill
the Albert Hall.
Divination procedures work equally well with different kinds of
multitude – flights of birds, entrails, stars, tea leaves. What seems
to matter is that some procedure is employed to make a seemingly
unordered mass reveal an order – typically by making or enabling a
decision, for example a simple yes or no to some enquiry. Books such
as the Bible or the works of Virgil are often used for the process of
what is known as a sortilege, literally legere, the reading, of a sors, a
lot, or portion. It seems to be important that the book in question is
not only regarded as sacred but is large enough to be thought to con-
tain the whole world in possibility. With the growing importance of
the Torah, the book would increasingly be consulted in preference
to prophets. The principle is articulated by Pieter van der Horst:

Since all that God had, has, and will have to say to mankind
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is contained in the Torah, and since he can be trusted to

guide and control this process of consultation, the answer
is incontrovertible, in fact a prophecy (nevu ‘ah). As one of
the early rabbis (Ben Bag-Bag) is reported to have said about
the Torah: ‘Turn it, and turn it again [i.e. study it from every
angle] for everything is in it’ (Mishna, Avoth v 22), not only
everything of the past, but also of the present and of the
future.11

Rabbis would ask children what verses they had studied that
day in school, and to take the answers as good or bad omens.12
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Christians also used the Bible as a divinatory resource, though this

practice was often condemned,13 and the works of Homer and Virgil,
whose status was almost as high in the classical world as that of the
Bible among the Jews, had also been used for bibliomancy, the latter
by means of the Sortes vergilianae.
Chance was sometimes combined with the operations of particu-
larly significant numbers, as, for example, in the practice recorded
among Lithuanian rabbis of opening the Hebrew Bible at random,
counting seven pages, then reading seven lines down, with the
resulting verse taken to be the revelation.14 There were secular ver-
sions of this kind of magical intersection of word and number, for
example the Sortes astrampsychi, a collection from the second or third
century ce of some 92 questions and 1,030 answers said to be the
work of the mythical magician Astrampsychos. A complex numerical
procedure governs the relationship between question and answer:

The enquirer first looks in the list of 92 numbered questions

to find his question or the one most like the question he
wants to raise. Then he chooses by some kind of sortition or
selects in his mind a number between 1 and 10 and adds it
to the number of his question. The sum thus reached has
now to be looked up in a list of oracular gods with a concor-
dance following after the list of questions. The concordance
indicates by means of a number after the god’s name the
‘decade,’ i.e., the section with ten possible answers. In that
decade the answer is found under the number that was
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chosen by lot. For example, your question is, ‘Will I get the
woman I want to have?’ This is question no. 29. You draw by
lot or select the number 7, so the total is 36. In the list of
oracular gods you find under 36 Hephaestus, and after his
name the concordance number 27. Decade 27 has under
number 7 the following answer to your question: ‘Yes, you
will get the woman you want, but much to your detriment!’15

Bibliomancy seems to depend on another version of the alterna-

tion between number and imagination discussed by Kant. The use
of chance depends on and is itself the proof of an open world of
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possibilities that is too large for the mind or imagination to en-

compass. But a sacred text is held to include all those possibilities,
in a set of one-to-one pairings between text and world, which are
ultimately the proof of the absolute two-in-one mirroring of the
world in the mind of God:

The universe is one close-meshed unit; heaven and earth,

animals, plants, angels, demons, man, all are creatures of
God, manifestations of His will, all so sensitively inter-
twined that each reacts immediately to the slightest
alteration in the composition of the whole . . . Events
predetermined in the mind of God impinge upon one or
another aspect of His universe long before they reach the
final stage of occurrence on earth; the superior sensitivity of
certain parts of the world, and even of parts of man’s imme-
diate environment and body, makes them responsive to what
is yet to be long before it is.16

As Michel Foucault writes, in such a world, ‘the universe was

folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing them-
selves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems
the secrets that were of use to man.’17 Divinatory practice, like many
other magical procedures with language, treats words as quasi-
numerical, as part of a vast system of one-to-one correspondences,
a system of twos that guarantees a universe of clearly distinguished
yet coupled ones. There will always be more than the human mind can
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comprehend, yet certain procedures will allow the breaking through

of knowledge of some portion of this otherwise unimaginable totality.
The word lot, and its plural lots, are subject to a similar semantic
movement from singularity to generality, from the specific to the un-
specified. A lot, perhaps from a Germanic word for a piece of wood
used for casting lots, is a particular allocation, that which is allotted,
whether by human process or by fortune – ‘my lot in life’. The Old
English hlot is in fact used to render Latin sors, a portion. But, as the
word lot came to be used like the word sort, to signify a number of
things or persons of the same kind, it seemed to move in the direc-
tion of the indefinite. The word also begins in the process to gather
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a sense of deprecation, as in a phrase like ‘that lot’, or ‘you lot’, and

with a drift towards the word load – a ‘bad lot’, ‘a load of rubbish’.
‘The lot’ comes to mean ‘the whole measure’, usually evoked in a way
that suggests an unparticularized multitude. The oed citations for
‘the lot’ typically begin with a series of items that is then broken off,
sometimes incorporating a dash or series of dots to signify indefinite
extension, ‘and so on’: ‘It was to be a big wedding – the full treatment
– Royalty – the lot’; ‘They are said to cure everything from rheuma-
tism to ringworm, colic to snake-bite . . . – the lot’; ‘The death of his
father . . . triggers off a crisis for him too, producing a temporary
breakdown, dismissal from his job, separation from his wife, the
lot’; ‘They’ve searched the island twice – helicopters, dogs, the lot.’
The authority of the idea of definite but unspecified quantities
hidden in uncountable masses may relate closely to the taboo on
counting that is found in many cultures.18 In Africa in particular, but
many other places besides, the taboo on counting embodies the fear
that making an exact count of living beings or possessions, children,
cattle or crops, will put them in danger of destruction: not counting
your chickens before they are hatched may be a mild form of this
inhibition.19 The taboo is often avoided by means of matching or
tallying procedures, such as reciting a verse or eeny-meeny-miny-
mo formula, which allow particular quantities to be established
without resort to counting.20 Indeed, Abraham Seidenberg suggests
that the use of fingers and toes may be important, not as the origin
of base-10 counting, but rather as a means of circumventing the
taboo on counting out loud.21
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The influence of the King James Bible has probably helped to

ensure that the word ‘multitude’ belongs to a distinctly religious
register, evoking awe and the sense of sublimity. But the powerfully
religious force of the word has lately passed across into political
discourse through the adoption of the term ‘multitude’ by political
theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who urge its substitution
for more monolithic terms like ‘mass’ or ‘people’:

The people is one. The population, of course, is composed

of numerous different individuals and classes, but the
people synthesizes or reduces these social differences into
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one identity. The multitude, by contrast, is not unified but

remains plural and multiple. This is why, according to the
dominance tradition of political philosophy, the people can
rule as a sovereign power and the multitude cannot. The
multitude is composed of a set of singularities – and by
singularity here we mean a social subject whose difference
cannot be reduced to sameness, a difference that remains
different . . . the challenge posed by the concept of multitude
is for a social multiplicity to manage to communicate and
act in common while remaining internally different.22

What holds the multitude together is the fact of their shared op-
position to the order of capital: ‘Our initial approach is to conceive
the multitude as all those who work under the rule of capital and
thus potentially as the class of those who refuse the rule of capital’
(Multitude, 106). This is therefore a kind of subjunctive multitude, the
multitude that is immanent in the mere multiplicity, a multitude-to-
come that would actualize the creative force of the common interests
of those who refuse the rule of capital: ‘Today we create as active
singularities, cooperating in the networks of the multitude, that is,
in the common’ (Multitude, 135).
An impatiently positivist view might be that this displays a fatal
uncertainty at the heart of Hardt and Negri’s project. Sometimes the
value and promise of multitude lies in the creative labour its con-
stituents have and hold as a kind of commonwealth and the common
aim they have of surpassing or circumventing the rule of capital. At
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other times, the power of multitude lies simply in the fact of its/their
very multiplicity, as the lack of commonness. The power of multi-
plicity is therefore dangerously demonic, insofar as the demonic
just means the multiple. Hardt and Negri relate the power of the
multitude to Dostoevsky’s The Devils:

What is so fearsome about the multitude is its indefinite number, at

the same time many and one. If there were only one conspiracy
against the old social order, like Dostoyevsky imagines, then it could
be known, is confronted, and defeated. Or if there were many separate,
isolated social threats, they too could be managed. The multitude,
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however, is legion; it is composed of innumerable elements that remain

different, one from the other, and yet communicate, collaborate, and
act in common. Now that is really demonic! (Multitude, 140)

Though understandable, impatience at the apparent ambiva-

lence of the idea of multitude would perhaps miss the point. Multi-
tude as demonic commons is an attempt to articulate a special kind
of number, or a special way of articulating number. Perhaps the
number of multitude is not to be rendered as a single, simple integer,
but as a kind of oscillating number-function that moves, only semi-
predictably, between the polarities of the one and the many. Perhaps,
indeed, this is the essential plurality of the idea of multitude – not
the simple plurality of that which, always being more than one, is
therefore always less than One, but the refusal to settle into either
the singularity of oneness or the singularity of plurality.
What makes the multiplicity of different kinds of classes cohere
is not any principle of organization arising from within itself, but an
external fact that makes mere multiplicity genitive, that is, a multi-
plicity of certain items or instances. This heteronomous principle is
capital, which, here, as almost everywhere else nowadays, is the great,
all-explaining ‘Count-As-One’ of the contemporary political imagi-
nation. What allegedly unites the forms of the multitude, what
brings its instances into commensurability and constitutes its his-
torical horizon of common purpose, is capitalism. And what is the
core, cohering principle of this capitalism but the subjection of the
incommensurable to measure for the purpose of extracting profit?
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The underlying principle of counted-as-one capitalism, the very prin-

ciple that allows it to be counted as one, and therefore in turn per-
mits the otherwise merely teeming multitude of its resistances also
to be counted as one, is nothing but the principle of counting itself.
All this is both product and producer of fantasy. Capitalism used
to be one thing among many, a particular set of economic relations
that could be reliably distinguished from other actually existing or
possible economic relations. Now, the function of the idea of
capitalism is to act as the horizon of horizons; no longer one
thing among many, it is the oneness of the many. In fact the only
capitalism there is – the only thing that makes ‘capitalism’ the great
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count-as-one that it increasingly has to be – is that which is recipro-

cally implied in the multitude that itself can only be unified by the
fabled object of its resistances. Capitalism depends on the multitude
that depends on it. Capitalism and multitude are reciprocating
genitives. The multitude is the multiplicity of resistances to capital;
capital is what the multiplicity of these resistances converges on.
There can be no multitude without count-as-one capitalism, but
there can be no capitalism that could count as one unless it gave rise
to a multitude that can be counted as one, can be grasped as more
(that is, less) than a mere multiplicity.

Legion
Religion is what binds – ligare. And this binding often involves the
imagination of number. Monotheism has been described by Peter
Sloterdijk as deriving from an allergy to the number two, which we
might see as the fundamental and formative fracture within the order
of number itself, and striving to bring ‘everything down to the num-
ber one, which tolerates no one and nothing but itself ’.23 Number is
useless without the capacity to count, that is, to take account of
pluralities. But plurality, the fact that there can be many different
kinds of singular, many different things that may be counted as one,
is always a threat to the establishment of number. Monotheism
depends on the claim that there is no god but God, but there are at
least three kinds of monotheism of which account must be taken; in
one of the three, the Christianity formed around the Trinity, the one
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is three. Monotheism is haunted by set-theoretical paradox, because

there must always be an excess, of outsiders who cannot be accom-
modated to the Kingdom of Heaven. It can only be one if it is not two,
but if it is only one and not two, then this means it does not in fact
include two, which means it cannot really be one. Oneness requires
there to be some surplus or remainder, which will nevertheless then
compromise any claim of any One to be All-in-one. This remainder
has many names: evil; the Devil; sin; woman; time. The singular-
plural, or singural name for this manyness is ‘Legion’, the name we
give to the one-who-is-not-one, who does not have a single name.
Hardt and Negri say that the self-designation by the Gerasene
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demoniac spoken of in the Gospels embodies a ‘metaphysical threat’,

for, ‘since it is at once singular and plural, it destroys numerical distinction
itself’ (Multitude, 138). So the demoniac is, like the Golem, another (one
in a numerical series, in fact) avatar of multitude itself. Hardt and
Negri would like multitude to put number in jeopardy because num-
ber as such is taken to be of the beast. Just as economic exploitation
requires the brutal violation of living labour by number, so

Political thought since the time of the ancients has been based on the
distinctions between the one, the few, and the many. The demonic multi-
tude violates all such numerical distinctions. It is both one and many.
The indefinite number of the multitude threatens all these principles
of order. Such trickery is the devil’s work. (Multitude, 138–9)

Demons are one of a number of beings-of-number, beings

whose ontology consists of their numerousness, that recur in the
thinking of capitalism and its opponents. Zombies have also often
been seen as metaphors for the half-dead enslaved proletariat of
capitalism, but, in some recent formulations, it is capitalism itself
which is zombie-like, because it is a kind of death-in-life, a virus that,
having no living creative force of its own, parasitically steals the
living labour of others, and transforms it into the pseudo-life of
number. So, we read, ‘21st-century capitalism as a whole is a zombie
system, seemingly dead when it comes to achieving human goals
and responding to human feelings, but capable of sudden spurts of
activity that cause chaos all around.’24 Jacques Derrida is among
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those who have pointed to the Gothic streaks in Marx’s writing,

which are tied to the desire to assert the principles of life against
death, or, worse, the counterfeiting of life:

Marx does not like ghosts any more than his adversaries do.
He does not want to believe in them. But he thinks of noth-
ing else . . . He believes he can oppose them, like life to death,
like vain appearances of the simulacrum to real presence.25

Zombies embody the horror of number, the horror of the fact of

there being, not just larger numbers of everything, but ever larger
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numbers of numbers. Zombies embody the condition of all numbers,

which is to impersonate life, since to be a mere number is not really
to be alive at all. But there is also a strange fecundity in zombies, who
transmit the contagion of their immortality seemingly without con-
straint. In fact, zombies share their quality of multitudinousness
with demons. The connection with the cosmic multitudes of the Old
Testament is that their exponentiality, their number-outnumbering-
itself, embodies an essentially economic promise, of a kind of
cosmic compound interest. They have an exorbitant multitude which
oscillates between bounteousness and abomination. Angels and
demons are both entities of pure number; though they are nameable
and countable, angels in particular being carefully ranked, into
seraphim, cherubim, principalities, powers, archangels and so on,
their essence seems to consist in a pure capacity for prodigious
expansion, beyond naming or numbering.
Religion, like politics, binds the many into one, often by means
of the idea of a collective body. For Hardt and Negri, the body of
multitude is itself multiple, not just because it is made up of multi-
plicity, but in that it comes into being between two possible forms
of imaginary incorporation. In the first such incorporation, multi-
tude is the body-double of capital. What Hart and Negri call,
extraordinarily, ‘the real flesh of postmodern production’ is ‘the
object from which collective capital tries to make the body of its
global development. capital wants to make the multitude, wants to
make it into a people’ (Multitude, 101). But this false or forced
incorporation is the very means by which multitude may find its
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real incarnation:

This is where, through the struggles of labor, the real pro-

ductive biopolitical figure of the multitude begins to emerge.
When the flesh of the multitude is imprisoned and trans-
formed into the body of global capital, it finds itself both
within and against the processes of capitalist globalization.
The biopolitical production of the multitude, however, tends
to mobilize what it shares in common against the imperial
power of global capital. In time, developing its productive
figure based on the common, the multitude can move
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through Empire and come out the other side, to express

itself autonomously and rule itself. (Multitude, 101)

It is scarcely surprising that the Christian notion of the mystical

body of the Church is invoked in section 2.2 of Multitude, entitled ‘De
Corpore’. Hardt and Negri look to the possibility ‘that these common
singularities organize themselves autonomously through a kind of
“power of the flesh” in line with the long philosophical tradition that
stretches back at least to the apostle Paul of Tarsus’ (Multitude, 159).
That such a view of multitude forms an exact parallel to what is com-
monly and contemptuously called ‘corporate culture’ is presumably
perfectly apparent to Hardt and Negri. Indeed, one of the signs of the
mixed body of which the idea of the multitude is made up is the fact
that it has attracted explication as theological politics, for example
in the comparisons of the decentred multitudes of the Occupy
movement to the ochlos, the word used frequently in the Gospels for
the crowd that attended Christ.26 The Gospels do not speak entirely
consistently about this, however, for Luke seems to use the word
ochlos in its more derogatory sense as ‘mob’ (Citron 1954, 410), and
generally has a less benign view of multitude; indeed, at one point,

unclean spirits’ are ἐνοχλούμενοι ἀπὸ πνευμάτων ἀκαθάρτων (Luke

he identifies multitude with madness, saying that those ‘vexed with

6:18), ochlos providing the verb for the demonic crowding out of
their senses.27 Western conceptions of multitude come together with
Eastern in the Korean notion of minjung, the people.28
To be sure, there is much incoherence in Hardt and Negri’s
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notion of multitude, but it is a telling and expressive and possibly

valuable incoherence, if only because of their agonized attempt to
assign a value to incoherence itself, in the one that comes to be one
in refusing to join up as one. Their work may be regarded as an in-
stance of the thinking of the multiple in itself called for by Michel
Serres at the beginning of his meditation on beginnings, Genesis. We
find it hard not to either break aggregates down into their atomic
constituents or round them up into unities:

We want a principle, a system, an integration, and we want

elements, atoms, numbers. We want them, and we make
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them. A single God, an identifiable individual. The aggre-

gate as such is not a well-formed object; it seems irrational
to us. The arithmetic of whole numbers remains a secret
foundation of our understanding; we’re all Pythagoreans.
We think only in monadologies.29

Serres makes out a ‘new object for philosophy’,30 in a pure,

which is really to say impure, multiplicity:

The multiple as such. Here’s a set undefined by elements or

boundaries. Locally, it is not individuated; globally it is not
summed up. So it’s neither a flock, nor a school, nor a heap,
nor a swarm, nor a herd, nor a pack. It is not an aggregate;
it is not discrete. It’s a bit viscous perhaps. A lake under the
mist, the sea, a white plain, background noise, the murmur
of a crowd, time.31

It was often reported during the nineteenth century that the most
primitive peoples – by which was often meant indigenous Aus-
tralians – had only three counting numbers: ‘1. Wagul. 2. Boola. 3.
Brewy. When a number exceeds three, they use the phrase murray loolo,
which signifies an indefinite number.’32 There will always be an area
of inexactitude, which is not beyond number as such but is beyond
exact number, in any apprehension of number. It is a sign of child-
ishness for us nowadays for somebody to imagine that there might
be a biggest number of all, since we know in principle that, no
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sooner have we invented a term for a very large number – a billion, a

light year or a terabyte – than that number can be multiplied or
squared and so on, to yield an even larger number. But we are not so
far removed historically from periods at which it was still possible
to marvel simply at the existence of vast numbers – for example, in
the early seventeenth century, at the realization of the huge number
of permutations required to ‘ring the changes’ completely of a set of
bells. We may perhaps call this the Archimedean point, after the story
that Archimedes asked for payment in the form of a grain of wheat
placed on a square of a chessboard, two grains on the next, four on
the next, and so on, doubling each time – the total exceeding the
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annual grain production of Egypt. The Archimedean point is fulcrum

at which, by extrapolation, one seems able to reach imaginatively out
into the realm of pure quantity, allowing one to inhabit an island of
numerative capacity in the midst of an ocean of pure number. Kant’s
mathematical sublime may describe a similar fulcrum or moment.
We are required to extend ourselves, not just mathematically, but
also imaginatively, further and further out into this indifferently grey
and churning ocean of pure number. As a result the dim void becomes
differentially textured and striated, becoming a kind of cartography
of significances and sensitivities. We are accustomed to think, and
we are certainly everywhere assured and instructed, that art and
literature are concerned with the exploration and preservation of the
kind of ‘human’ qualities that are under threat from the ‘inhuman’
dominion of number. But only the numbest kind of abstract thinking,
which might itself be taken as an instance of the kind of calculative
rationality of which it dreams, allows us to imagine that qualities and
quantities can be separated in this way. What we call qualities – the
pain of a toothache, the pinkness of a sunrise – are almost always
quantical; always, that is to say, a matter of more or less consciously
calculated degree. And the quantical is always itself a matter of differ-
ential qualities. Despite the conventional revulsion from number, a
revulsion which Hardt and Negri share even with mathematical
writers like Alain Badiou, their work forces a recognition that all
responsible and intelligent thought must now pass through number,
and in ever more complex ways. We do not need to have the synaes-
thete’s conviction of the blueness of fives or the pointiness of primes
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to be able to apprehend and appreciate these qualities. Far from being

at threat from or themselves opposed to the realm of number, art and
literature (and not, of course, just these, but also pushpin and pop
music) are indispensable agents in the ‘existing’ of number, to
borrow a term from Jean-Paul Sartre, the embedding of numerical
awareness and sensitivity into more and more areas of social and
personal life.33 Nowhere is this more the case than in the different
ways in which the imagination of multitude is elaborated.

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Hi la r io us A r ithm et i c

Working Out
To say that mathematics is something to be done, as I observed at
the beginning of Chapter Two, is to recognize its deserved reputation
for being hard work. Mathematics has to be done, to be worked out,
in a way that other intellectual operations do not. If children are
enjoined to ‘show their workings’ in mathematics, that is because
mathematics, unlike music, say, or geography, consists in its work-
ings, rather than its outcomes. If the world is indeed written in the
language of mathematics, there is labour in that deciphering. And
yet there is also no mental discipline which seems more to exemplify
Michel Serres’ principle that in fact all work amounts to sorting,
whether hard, through the physical movement or transformation of
things through the expenditure of physical energy, or soft, through
the sifting of information or ideas.1
The work involved in mathematical procedure is between the
soft and the hard. There is always some kind of cost in computa-
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tional effort involved in the forming of every calculation, whether

that calculation be performed by a supercomputer or a sulky second-
former. The idea of infinity means that one can carry on adding one
to any number without ever coming to an end. But Brian Rotman has
suggested that there is a cost even to the elementary action of count-
ing, and indeed, makes it one of the reasons why he says we must
abandon belief in the existence of infinite quantities; for there must
come a point at which the computing resources necessary simply to
keep in mind the largest number ever articulated, and then add one
to it, would exhaust all the energy in the universe. There would come
a point at which one would be bound to lose count, whatever system
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were devised for keeping it.2 Perhaps this is why the Godhead is
sometimes identified, not just with the infinite, but with the infinite
capacity to keep count: even the very hairs of your head are all num-
bered, Christ assures us, on an occasion ‘when there were gathered
together an innumerable multitude of people, insomuch that they
trode one upon another’ (Luke 12:7, 12:1). The uneasiness of certain
groups of believers about the difficulties for God of reassembling
bodies that have been dissolved by fire, as in cremation, as compared
to bodies that have been kept (as they imagine) relatively intact, as in
burial, is the hint of an impious doubt even among the most devout
of the operational limits even of the Good Lord’s molecular database.
But it feels as though one need not in fact resort to this kind of
operation, which, tellingly perhaps, mathematicians call a ‘brute
force’ operation. It feels as though applying the logical principle that
there must always be a one that can be added exacts no cost at all,
any more than simply and immediately seeing that 2 + 2 = 4 does. I
can prove that 2 + 2 = 4 by counting, but mathematics means not
having to count, even if its results depend upon the possibility of this
application of brute force in the first or final instance.
Indeed, mathematics operates between these two polarities, of
the huge and the minimal, the massive and the negligible, the ener-
getic and the angelic, the quantical and the nonquantical. Indeed,
this is the reason why so many scientists, somewhat to the surprise
of those in the humanities, insist that mathematics cannot be scien-
tific. For mathematics depends upon – really, in fact, consists in –
the generation of proofs, which go (almost) to infinite pains to show
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that the complex equivalences of quantities and relations made out

by calculation have existed all along. The largest known prime num-
ber, discovered on 7 January 2016 by Curtis Cooper at the University
of Central Missouri, is 274,207,281–1. It took 31 days of continuous
computing to prove the primality of this number. And yet that con-
siderable outlay of conjoined human and mechanical work yields no
outcome that makes any difference to the way things are and always
must have been in the world of numbers. The largest prime happens
to be one of only 49 known Mersenne primes, that is a prime number
formed from 2n–1, where n is itself a prime number. Like all prime
numbers, it has been there all along, and so might perfectly well
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have been stumbled upon by accident, rather than as a result of the

assiduous searches being conducted worldwide by the Great Internet
Mersenne Prime Search (gimps).
One of the links between comedy and mathematics depends on
this strange identity of exertion and ease, of almost everything and
scarcely anything. One might even say that there is a kind of drawn-
out absurdity in the procedure of solving, the effort to show that
something is exactly what it was all along. Mathematical proof
depends upon demonstrating forms of equation that depend upon
the increasingly radical non-equality of the effort of the proof and
its outcome.
If mathematical proofs can be thought of as the solving of
puzzles, they can, by the same token, and using almost the same
terms, also be seen as having the structure of a joke, according to
the terms of the well-known relief theory of comedy. This receives
a formulation in the work of Immanuel Kant, who writes in his
Critique of Judgement that ‘Laughter is an affect arising from a strained
expectation being suddenly reduced to nothing.’3 He gives the example of
the following joke, or ‘joke’:

an Indian at an Englishman’s table in Surat saw a bottle of

ale opened, and all the beer turned into froth and flowing
out. The repeated exclamations of the Indian showed his
great astonishment. ‘Well, what is so wonderful in that?’
asked the Englishman. ‘Oh, I’m not surprised myself,’ said
the Indian, ‘at its getting out, but at how you ever managed
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to get it all in.’4

The laughter, such as it is, prompted by this story comes about, says
Kant, because ‘the bubble of our expectation was extended to the full
and suddenly burst into nothing.’5 There is an interesting wrinkle in
this particular example, since the process whereby something comes
to nothing in the response to the joke is mirrored by the terms of the
joke itself, which is itself precisely about something turning into
something that is as good as nothing (froth). It is as though the joke
were showing its own workings, which is no doubt the reason for
its utility for Kant, even though he does not mention it.
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An expectation is created, then dissipated: a something is

suddenly transformed into a nothing. We might say that the simple
formula for this operation would be 1 – 1 = 0. Subtract something
from itself, and the result will be nothing. But the joke as explicated
by Kant seems also to accord with another formula, according to
which something is shown to be equivalent to nothing, something
is shown to have been nothing at all, all along. The formula for this
would be 1 = 0. The issue touched on here, or, as one is tempted to
say, in view of the explosive implications, touched off, is the complex
one of whether zero is in fact to be regarded as a number at all. In
many instances of comedy, zero is not so much a particular quantity
as the sudden abeyance of the quantitative as such. Zero is not so
much a position on the number line as a gap in it, or an intersection
of that number line by nonnumericality. Viewed in this way, zero
would not be in the same plane as the other numbers, but perpendicu-
lar to number as such. If a number signifies something countable, a
zero signifies that there is nothing countable there. You cannot count
zero; you can only take account of its uncountability.
Kant is intrigued by another aspect of the joke relation, namely
the communication in it of two kinds of thing: representation and
the body. Kant tells us that ‘this very reduction [of an expectation to
nothing] at which certainly understanding cannot rejoice, is still
indirectly a source of very lively enjoyment for a moment. Its cause
must consequently lie in the influence of the representation upon
the body, and the reciprocal effect of this on the mind.’6 So laughter
is not just a violent alternation of contraction and dilation in the
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muscles, but an alternation between physical muscles and, so to

speak, the muscles of the mind involved in forming expectations:

it is readily intelligible how the sudden act above referred to,

of shifting the mind now to one standpoint and now to the
other, to enable it to contemplate its object, may involve a
corresponding and reciprocal straining and slackening of
the elastic parts of our viscera, which communicates itself
to the diaphragm (and resembles that felt by ticklish people),
in the course of which the lungs expel the air with rapidly
succeeding interruptions, resulting in a movement beneficial
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to health. This alone, and not what goes on in the mind, is

the proper cause of the gratification in a thought that at
bottom represents nothing.7

On Kant’s account, it is an interchange between the body and

the mind, the actual and the represented, form and information, that
produces laughter. Kant is followed in this strange economy that
connects the physical and the mental by Freud, who, in his Jokes and
their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), presents his version of the relief
theory proposed by Kant and others before him. Freud proposes that,
instead of an expectation suddenly being deflated, the mechanism
of what he calls the ‘joke-work’8 – in parallel with the ‘dream-work’
that he had introduced five years previously in The Interpretation of
Dreams – produces an expectation of an effort of inhibition or repres-
sion, which is suddenly removed. Laughter, for Freud, is not a mere
incongruity, a friction or tickling of difference, but a sudden alter-
nation of quantity. A quantity of what? we may enquire. For no effort
seems in fact to be made here, only an anticipation or feint of an
effort. And yet this potential effort nonetheless seems capable of
producing a saving or bonus, when it turns out not to be required.
Perhaps the equation for this might be written as: 0 + (1 – 1) = 1.
Freud tells a joke, though he is not sure whether it should really
count as one, which seems to enact this nonsense economy:

A gentleman entered a pastry-cook’s shop and ordered a

cake; but he soon brought it back and asked for a glass of
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liqueur instead. He drank it and began to leave without

having paid. The proprietor detained him. ‘You’ve not paid
for the liqueur.’ ‘But I gave you the cake in exchange for it.’
‘You didn’t pay for that either.’ ‘But I hadn’t eaten it.’9

Words and Numbers

Numbers stand out against words. Numbers and words belong to
drastically different orders. This is nicely illustrated by the joke about
a man who goes to a monastery where all the jokes have been told
so many times that they have been assigned numbers. He says a few
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numbers at random, and is gratified by polite chuckles from all

round the room. When however he ventures on the number 367, the
room suddenly erupts into laughter, the monks slap each other on
the back, clutching themselves and wheezing with helpless laughter.
When the guffawing eventually subsides, the man asks his guide why
367 was so much funnier than the jokes indicated by other numbers.
‘We hadn’t heard that one before,’ he replies.
So this suggests a strange antinomy. Words and numbers
connote different kinds of value. Words embody values; they are our
way of articulating difference of values. No word is equivalent to any
other word. Words embody, that is to say, the principle of the incom-
mensurability of values. Numbers, on the other hand, allow for the
possibility of equivalence. Any number, as we saw in Chapter Three,
can be rendered exactly and entirely in terms of other numbers;
indeed, this is the only way in which a number can be defined. Words
mean uniqueness: numbers mean equivalence.
Numbers and words appear to have been pulling apart from each
other for some time. And yet there is no number that cannot be
articulated as a word, or words, nor any mathematical function that
cannot in the end be made articulate in words. Contrariwise, we
know that every word can now be represented in digital form. So,
although words and numbers seem incommensurable, they also in
fact interpenetrate; words enclose numbers entirely, and numbers
coincide exactly with words. Standing over against numbers, words
yet take issue with themselves. I want to show in this chapter that
laughter involves, I dare not yet say invariably derives from, this
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perturbation, from the seemingly alien presence within language of

the kind of indifference or equivalence represented by number.
As we saw in Chapter Three, Elizabeth Sewell shows that the
playfulness that is characteristic of nonsense writing depends on the
two leading characteristics of number, namely distinctness and
seriality; numbering assumes and instances a world of absolutely
distinct units, and also assumes and instances the arrangement of
those units in a series marked by counting.10 These two principles are
so tightly bound together in the simplest mathematical procedures
that we do not often notice that they pull in different directions. For
seriality embodies absolute incommensurability, since no number
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can equal another number that occupies a different place in the

series; two can never equal three, and four can never equal five. The
principle of seriality ensures, not only that all numbers are absolutely
distinct, but that all numbers are absolutely unique.
But the principle of seriality also decrees that all numbers are
unique, and therefore absolutely distinct from each other, in exactly
the same way; that is, they all differ from each other in terms of
the units that constitute them. There are three ones in three, and
four ones in four; and the ‘ones’ in each case are absolutely identical
and interchangeable. Imagine if, counting from one to four, one had
to remember that the intervals between one and two and two and
three and three and four were slightly different, and so had to be
kept in the right order. But it does not matter a bit what kind of ones
are, as we say, ‘added up together’, since all the ‘ones’ in question,
indeed all ‘ones’ of any kind, are all the same. So there is no real ‘up’,
since one can add numbers in any direction. In fact, the capacity to
order numbers serially, the capacity to count, and therefore the
quality which numbers seem to have of allowing or mandating a
world of mere numbers, is borrowed from the ordering operation
performed upon numbers by the naming of numbers as numerals,
or number-words.
There is a story told of the young Carl Friedrich Gauss that may
dramatize this tension between the serial and the reversible. His
class was asked by their teacher to add together all the numbers be-
tween one and a hundred. His peers set about this task with pencil
and paper, no doubt most of them ordering the numbers in addition
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columns: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4, and so on. Carl reflected for a moment or two,

then put up his hand. ‘5,050,’ he said.11 Where the other children had
set out to work through the numbers, Carl, possessed of a highly de-
veloped capacity to envisage numbers as physical things, had simply
‘looked at’ the line of numbers from 1 to 100, and recognized that the
best place to begin was not at the beginning, but in the middle. Or
rather, just after the middle, for he saw that 50 sat next to 51, which,
added together, made 101. And, if one took the two numbers that
bracketed this pair, 49 and 52, they too added up to 101. And so
did the next two numbers out, 48 and 53, just as every other pair
would have to, all the way to 2 and 99 and finally 1 and 100. And,
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since there were exactly fifty such pairs, the required total must be
50 × 101 = 5050.
Gauss had performed a calculation by resisting seriality, that is,
recognizing the indifference to order of the units ordered in the
number line. The number line from 1 to 100 will have many numbers
that will seem to a non-mathematical intelligence and indeed to
some kinds of mathematicians to be full of erogenous zones and
hotspots, numbers possessed of particular kinds of significance, no
doubt in part because this particular sequence seems to mark the
practical limits of the number of years a human being is likely to live.
The numbers between 1 and 100 seem possessed of a certain life, a
quality that is unevenly distributed across them, the quality of being
unevenly distributed, because they serve so well to count up the years
of a life. There might be other reasons for according magical asso-
ciations to numbers: one might equally live at number 76, or regard
thirteen as unlucky. All numbers are equal, but, viewed as most
human beings do view them, some are more equal than others:
because we operate a decimal system, no doubt founded on the
convenience of counting on our fingers, tens seem to provide break-
points or caesuras, octaves (if I may mix my numerical bases for a
moment), in the scale.
This tension between distinction and indistinctness is embodied
in the distinction between numerology and numerality. Gauss could
see past this clumped or lumpy quality of the number line, which can
ordinarily only be smoothed into commensurability by the work of
calculation, painfully decomposing 17 or 73 to their constituent
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units. He not only knew, he could, so to speak, see immediately that

numbers were all absolutely the same. He could see past the differ-
ences in quality of numbers to their indifferent equality. This
meant that he was able to break the mesmerizing spell of the
number line itself. It did not make any difference where one started,
except that there was one point in the sequence, a sort of cardinal
point, just around the middle, where this principle was best
illustrated, so that calculation was scarcely needed at all.
Samuel Beckett has the character Arsene in his most mathem-
atical novel Watt voice something of this same equanimity. Arsene is
about to leave the house of Mr Knott, and is delivering himself of a
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peroration in which he attempts to provide some account of his time

in the house and what he has learned from it. And what he has
learned is precisely that there is nothing, or nothing cumulative, to
be learned:

And if I could begin it all over again, knowing what I know

now, the result would be the same. And if I could begin again
a third time, knowing what I would know then, the result
would be the same. And if I could begin it all over again a
hundred times, knowing each time a little more than the
time before, the result would always be the same, and the
hundredth life as the first, and the hundred lives as one. A
cat’s flux. But at this rate we shall be here all night.12

I am not sure that this is exactly a joke in itself, but there is something
joke-like in its structure, consisting as it does of an open accumula-
tion of verbal circumstance that rounds up, or down, to nothingness.
But perhaps there is some significance in that ‘exactly a joke’;
perhaps everything I will be saying in this chapter may amount or be
reduced to the observation that when a joke is almost a joke, but
not quite, it is not really a joke at all, and when it is, it is absolutely.
Comedy is all-or-nothing digital; tragedy is that’ll-do analogue.
Dickens is often represented as a writer of imaginative excess, a
writer who, in the prodigiousness of his invention, spills exuberantly
beyond measure and proportion. Dickens set his face against the
grim hedonic calculus of what he took to be utilitarianism (among
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the few things for which Dickens daily needs absolution is the
vicious and stupid misunderstanding of utilitarian philosophy he
bequeathed to a literary culture that remains smug and ignorant
about it), promoting the principles of disproportion and the meas-
ureless. Dickens’s critique of utilitarianism is embodied in the figure
of Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times, who is introduced to us as

A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man

who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four,
and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing
for anything over . . . With a rule and a pair of scales, and the
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multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh

and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly
what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of
simple arithmetic.13

And yet Dickens himself was a writer who, in his successful exploita-
tion of serial fiction, lived and wrote, literally, by numbers, in thrall
to the endlessly renewed demand that he fill up the 32 printed pages
that were required for each monthly part of the novels he wrote over
twenty months. Dickens thrived on excess, but it was an excess that
he subjected to mathematical control, and that was tightly dependent
on mathematical constraints for its quantitative easings. He liked to
measure the success of his legendary public readings by the number of
ladies who were carried out insensible. And Dickens’s comedy, like
his writing practice in general, is in fact intertwined and impregnated
with number from top to bottom.
As many have observed, Dickens’s comedy often depends upon
the reduction of character to a single trait or mechanical mannerism.
In the case of Uncle Pumblechook, who is one of the many tormen-
tors of the infant Pip in Great Expectations, it is his compulsion to keep
Pip up to the mark by means of continuous arithmetic.

I considered Mr Pumblechook wretched company. Besides

being possessed by my sister’s idea that a mortifying and
penitential character ought to be imparted to my diet – be-
sides giving me as much crumb as possible in combination
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with as little butter, and putting such a quantity of warm water

into my milk that it would have been more candid to have
left the milk out altogether – his conversation consisted of
noth-ing but arithmetic. On my politely bidding him Good
morning, he said, pompously, ‘Seven times nine, boy?’ And
how should I be able to answer, dodged in that way, in a
strange place, on an empty stomach! I was hungry, but before
I had swallowed a morsel, he began a running sum that lasted
all through the breakfast. ‘Seven?’ ‘And four?’ ‘And eight?’ ‘And
six?’ ‘And two?’ ‘And ten?’ And so on. And after each figure
was disposed of, it was as much as I could do to get a bite or

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a sup, before the next came; while he sat at his ease guessing
nothing, and eating bacon and hot roll, in (if I may be allowed
the expression) a gorging and gormandizing manner.14

Two orders are brought into collision here. First of all, there is
the order of eating, measured, as so often in Dickens, with an alter-
nating economy of generosity and niggardliness. Where the kindly,
helpless blacksmith Joe spoons gravy on to Pip’s plate in recompense
for the domestic humiliations he must suffer, Pumblechook’s
homeopathic dilution of the milk of human kindness makes for sub-
traction where increase should be. Then there is the alternative order
of calculation, which, through Pumblechook’s renewed inquisition,
monopolizes the organ of eating, the mouth, which is thereby
reduced to a round, empty zero. The ongoing calculation scarcely
deserves the name of mental arithmetic, since its effect is to replace
eating with inanition, rations with rationality.
It would be easy to cash out the comedy of this passage through
a Bergsonian analysis that would see it as taking revenge on
Pumblechook by lopping him down to his impulse to impose single-
minded and sadistic arithmetic. The more Pumblechook piles on the
numbers, the more he is himself reduced to a single characteristic,
to a unity of being that is in fact only an unnatural fraction of what it
ought to mean to be a human being. The notable fact here though is
that, as always in such cases, Dickens enters so far into Pumble-
chook’s maniacal mathematics in order to achieve his comic effect.
Dickens’s narrative plays with the possibility that it might itself get
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caught up in the churning gears of Pumblechook’s arbitrary arith-

metic. Pumblechook’s improvised tot has no answer or outcome,
and the numbers both do and do not matter. If Pumblechook reduces
Pip to a number-crunching machine, he and his narrative are caught
in the jaws of the same logic. Indeed, Pumblechook is represented
increasingly as subjected to the process with which he seeks to
subjugate Pip:

we came to Miss Havisham’s house, which was of old brick,

and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of
the windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all
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the lower were rustily barred. There was a courtyard in front,

and that was barred; so we had to wait, after ringing the bell,
until some one should come to open it. While we waited at
the gate, I peeped in (even then Mr. Pumblechook said, ‘And
fourteen?’ but I pretended not to hear him).15

Dismissed from the gate by the pert Estella, Pumblechook

attempts to regain some of his crumpled dignity with a parting bit
of moralism:

[he] departed with the words reproachfully delivered: ‘Boy!

Let your behavior here be a credit unto them which brought
you up by hand!’ I was not free from apprehension that he
would come back to propound through the gate, ‘And
sixteen?’ But he didn’t.16

Nevertheless, the running joke of Pumblechook’s running sum

is brought to a kind of reckoning, when Pip returns from Miss
Havisham’s and is reluctant to reveal what has occurred there:

‘First (to get our thoughts in order): Forty-three pence?’

I calculated the consequences of replying ‘Four Hundred
Pound,’ and finding them against me, went as near the
answer as I could – which was somewhere about eightpence
off. Mr Pumblechook then put me through my pence-table
from ‘twelve pence make one shilling,’ up to ‘forty pence
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make three and fourpence,’ and then triumphantly de-

manded, as if he had done for me, ‘Now! How much is forty-
three pence?’ To which I replied, after a long interval of
reflection, ‘I don’t know.’ And I was so aggravated that I
almost doubt if I did know.
Mr. Pumblechook worked his head like a screw to screw
it out of me, and said, ‘Is forty-three pence seven and
sixpence three fardens, for instance?’
‘Yes!’ said I. And although my sister instantly boxed my
ears, it was highly gratifying to me to see that the answer
spoilt his joke, and brought him to a dead stop.17
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Pumblechook thinks to have finished Pip off with his inquisition, but

it is really Pip who, in the detail slyly insinuated by his author, has
‘calculated the consequences’. By refusing to take the sum seriously,
Pip exposes Pumblechook to the indifference of number that he has
himself been wielding as a weapon. The principle that Pumblechook
brings to bear on Pip, namely of reducing everything to number, is
itself applied to him. There are two competing orders of arithmetic,
just as there are two jokes: Pumblechook’s and Pip’s, which ‘spoilt
his joke, and brought him to a dead stop’.
At the beginning of his book on laughter, Bergson helps us to rec-
ognize an important aspect of this kind of satirical humour, when he
points to the strange neutrality that is essential to the comic impulse:

I would point out . . . the absence of feeling which usually

accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could
not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on
the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled.
Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no
greater foe than emotion . . . the comic demands something
like a momentary anesthesia of the heart. Its appeal is to
intelligence, pure and simple.18

We may perhaps describe feelings as the embodiment of values:

feelings are the way in which we enact the fact and the manner of
things mattering to us. The equatability or equivalence of all values
that is characteristic of the numerical suggests to Bergson a world
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without feeling, a world of pure intelligence:

In a society composed of pure intelligences there would

probably be no more tears, though perhaps there would still
be laughter; whereas highly emotional souls, in tune and
unison with life, in whom every event would be sentimen-
tally prolonged and re-echoed, would neither know nor
understand laughter.19

The work in which Beckett comes closest to immersing himself

and his reader in the destructive equanimity of number is surely Watt
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and, within that novel of obsessive accumulations, permutations and

calculations, the most sustained exercise in mathematized narrative
is the episode, allegedly recounted by Arthur to Watt and others in
Mr Knott’s garden, which deals with the appearance before a College
committee of Ernest Louit, accompanied by what he claims to be a
mathematical savant from the far West of Ireland, in order to account
for the £50 of college funds that he has expended in research for the
dissertation he entitles ‘The Mathematical Intuitions of the Visicelts’.
Louit has plainly put the research grant advanced to him by the Col-
lege to other uses than the investigation of mathematical capacities
among the indigent indigenes of County Clare (for the amazement
of whom £5 has been set aside in his budget to purchase ‘coloured
beads’). In a sense, the entire episode is an attempt to supply an
alternative, and extravagantly inflationary, budget in place of the
simple account of how the money has in fact been spent. Numbers
begin early on to take the place of words:

The College Bursar now wondered, on behalf of the com-

mittee, if it would be convenient to Mr. Louit to give some
account of the impetus imparted to his studies by his short
stay in the country. Louit replied that he would have done so
with great pleasure if he had not had the misfortune to mis-
lay, on the very morning of his departure from the west,
between the hours of eleven and midday, in the gentlemen’s
cloakroom of Ennis railway-station, the one hundred and
five loose sheets closely covered on both sides with short-
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hand notes embracing the entire period in question. This

represented, he added, an average of no less than five pages,
or ten sides, per day. He was now exerting himself to the
utmost, and indeed he feared greatly beyond his strength,
with a view to recuperating his ms., which, qua ms., could
not be of the smallest value to any person other than himself
and, eventually, humanity.20

Numbers begin also to infiltrate the account of the enquiry, first

of all in the account provoked by the seemingly innocuous statement
that ‘The committee . . . began to look at one another,’ followed
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immediately by the odd and ominous qualification, ‘and much

time passed, before they succeeded in doing so’. As so often in Watt,
a simple proposition detonates a long chain of permutational
reasoning:

when five men look at one another, though in theory only

twenty looks are necessary, every man looking four times, yet
in practice this number is seldom sufficient, on account of
the multitude of looks that go astray. For example, Mr. Fitzwein
looks at Mr. Magershon, on his right. But Mr. Magershon is
not looking at Mr. Fitzwein, on his left, but at Mr. O’Meldon,
on his right. But Mr. O’Meldon is not looking at Mr. Mager-
shon, on his left, but, craning forward, at Mr. MacStern, on
his left but three at the far end of the table. But Mr. MacStern
is not craning forward looking at Mr. O’Meldon, on his right
but three at the far end of the table, but is sitting bolt upright
looking at Mr. de Baker, on his right. But Mr. de Baker is not
looking at Mr. MacStern, on his left, but at Mr. Fitzwein, on
his right. Then Mr. Fitzwein, tired of looking at the back of
Mr. Magershon’s head, cranes forward and looks at Mr.
O’Meldon, on his right but one at the end of the table.21

The only solution to the irrational waste and blunder of all these
wildly misdirected eyebeams, our insanely meticulous author tells
us, is for the committee to mathematize the process of looking at
itself, by assigning each committee member a number:
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Then, when the time comes for the committee to look at

itself, let all the members but number one look together at
number one, and let number one look at them all in turn,
and then close, if he cares to, his eyes, for he has done his
duty. Then of all those members but number one who have
looked together at number one, and by number one been
looked at one by one, let all but number two look at number
two, and let number two in his turn look at them all in turn,
and then remove, if his eyes are sore, his glasses, if he is in
the habit of wearing glasses, and rest his eyes, for they are
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no longer required, for the moment. Then of all those mem-

bers but number two, and of course number one, who have
looked together at number two, and by number two been
looked at one by one, let all with the exception of number
three look together at number three, and let number three
in his turn look at them all in turn, and then get up and go
to the window and look out, if he feels like a little exercise
and change of scene, for he is no longer needed, for the time
being. Then of all those members of the committee with the
exception of number three, and of course of numbers two
and one, who have looked together at number three and by
number three been looked at one by one, let all save number
four look at number four, and let number four in his turn
look at them one after another, and then gently massage his
eyeballs, if he feels the need to do so, for their immediate
role is terminated. And so on, until only two members of the
committee remain, whom then let at each other look, and
then bathe their eyes, if they have their eyebaths with them,
with a little laudanum, or weak boracic solution, or warm
weak tea, for they have well deserved it. Then it will be found
that the committee has looked at itself in the shortest pos-
sible time, and with the minimum number of looks, that is
to say x squared minus x looks if there are x members of the
committee, and y squared minus y if there are y.22

The text depends upon the tussle between words and numbers.
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This might approximate to a contest between temporality, for words,

at least in their condition as utterance, must transpire in time, and
spatiality. Actually, we should acknowledge that this is a conflict
which exists within mathematics, in the relation between the for-
mula and the proof, the quod and the demonstrandum. Unless, perhaps,
mathematics is nothing else but this tension between what is and
the working out of what is; God, outside time, presumably does not
do mathematics, since he knows the answers already – though
Wittgenstein wonders ‘Can God know all the places of the expansion
of π?’23 The work of Watt is to rotate the mathematically simultan-
eous into the wordy dimension of the consecutive, and then back
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again. Linearity, by which is really meant irreversibility, is repeatedly

folded back into reversibility. The filling of space by oscillation and
alternation takes the place of onward movement from one point to
another, meaning that the space of the novel is filled rather than
traversed. Numbers are able to order the world in the way they do
precisely because they make the order, in the sense of the order of
succession of things, irrelevant. This process is announced in Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland:

‘What do you know about this business?’ the King said to

Alice.
‘Nothing,’ said Alice.
‘Nothing whatever?’ persisted the King.
‘Nothing whatever,’ said Alice.
‘That’s very important,’ the King said, turning to the jury.
They were just beginning to write this down on their slates,
when the White Rabbit interrupted: ‘Unimportant, your
Majesty means, of course,’ he said, in a very respectful tone,
but frowning and making faces at him as he spoke.
‘Unimportant, of course, I meant,’ the King hastily said,
and went on to himself in an undertone, ‘important – unim-
portant – unimportant – important – ’ as if he were trying
which word sounded best.24

The Louit episode in Watt is full of doubled and multiplied

words: ‘yes yes’, ‘no no’, ‘haha’, ‘come come’, ‘oh no no no no no’.
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Words are not numbered, but numerous. And the principle of re-
versibility is also powerfully in evidence. Beckett’s drafts indicate
that Mr Nackybal’s name is a derivation from Caliban, itself of course
an adjustment of Cannibal. Nackybal is converted in the episode to
Ballynack and Nackynack. Cannibalism seems to be a metaphor for
the churning of elements in the episode. Louit explains that hunger
has forced him to roast and eat his faithful dog O’Connor, leaving
only his bones, and Beckett probably only refrains with difficulty
from concluding this story with the traditional Irish-bull ending,
which would have had Louit lamenting: ‘A pity O’Connor isn’t here;
he’d have loved these bones.’25
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Our humanistic prejudices may incline us to say that words are

here being reduced to the inhuman definiteness of numbers, but
Beckett’s text is determined to show us something like the reverse,
that to numerize is to defer the possibility of making any final or
finite statement. Insofar as it passes through number, the pursuit of
completeness or absolute truth will always be put at infinite risk.
The arts, self-identifying as they, possibly we, are with the in-
definite, the open and the fluidly non-absolute, are inclined to view
scientific reasoning as paralysed by abstraction and a kind of false,
inhuman positivity. In fact, though, there are reasons to suspect the
arts of confusing absoluteness with exactitude. It is in fact approxi-
mation that allows for absoluteness. This is well illustrated in the
story of the researcher seeking responses from different kinds of
academic to the suggestion that all odd numbers are primes. The
mathematician says: ‘1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9
is not prime. The conjecture is false.’ The physicist says: ‘1 is prime,
3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime, 11 is prime, 13 is
prime. Within acceptable limits of measurement error, the conjec-
ture holds.’ The literary critic says: ‘1 is prime, 3 is prime, 5 is prime,
7 is prime, 9 is prime – it’s true! All odd numbers are prime!’
Mathematics has the reputation of being more economical and
less wasteful than words, but it is words that encourage us im-
patiently to square things off and round things up into always ap-
proximative absoluteness. Words save time, the time that numbers
are. But at this rate we shall be here all night.
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Laughing by Numbers
My proposal is that laughter is produced from the friction and fission
of the positive values that are put into play by the joke-work and the
pure negativity, negativity that is best embodied by number, that
intersects with them. Things that matter suddenly come to nothing,
are suddenly made to be things that do not matter at all; nonequival-
ence is rotated suddenly into absolute equivalence. Equivalence is
not just nothingness. It can also be considered as a kind of null
infinity, for the equivalence of numbers, their capacity to be manipu-
lated and reversed and recombined, means that there is no end to
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their equivalences, which are therefore indifferently everything

and nothing.
The most surprising reversal in this is that it is now the order of
words that signifies the positivity of meaning, or value. The order of
numbers, by contrast, signifies, not the quantifiable, but the non-
quantifiable, the nothing-at-all that is equivalent to anything-at-all.
So, unexpectedly, it is number that represents the eruption of the
nonquantical into the order of the quantical, of equality into quality.
Just as the sign for zero seems to be the intersection of the order of
numbers and the nonnumerical, so numbers can act as the inter-
section of the positive qualities signified by words, and the indif-
ference of number. If nothing is the other of number, then number
is the nothingness that is the other of words, that nevertheless is
powerfully at work within words. Number is the other of words
that words themselves harbour, with hilarity the outcome of its
demonstration.
G. H. Hardy himself suggests something of this near-nihilism
that exists within number, in his final estimations of the value of his
own mathematical life:

I have never done anything ‘useful’. No discovery of mine

has made, or is likely to make, directly or indirectly, for good
or ill, the least difference to the amenity of the world. I have
helped to train other mathematicians, but mathematicians
of the same kind as myself, and their work has been, so far
at any rate, as I have helped them to it, as useless as my own.
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Judged by all practical standards, the value of my mathem-

atical life is nil; and outside mathematics it is trivial anyhow.26

Others might be inclined to see this as a claim for the intrinsic value
of an intellectual enterprise, rather than its instrumental value, but
it is notable that Hardy insists that this almost-nullity is nevertheless
to be measured numerically:

The case for my life, then, or for that of anyone else who has
been a mathematician in the same sense in which I have
been one is this; that I have added something to knowledge,
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and helped others to add more; and that these somethings

have a value which differs in degree only and not in kind,
from that of the creations of the great mathematicians, or of
any of the great artists, great or small, who have left some
kind of memorial behind them.27

Our complacent assumption is that laughter has something to

do with our triumph over the inert, that it is life asserting its claims
against the givenness or dead necessity of things. But the strong
implication of the mathematically driven comedy I have considered
here suggests that this cannot be the whole story. For the implication
of number and pure quantity in comedy suggests that it must at least
include some insurgence of the inert, an assertion of the purely
quantical against the world of quality. We do not merely laugh at
number, we also laugh by numbers. To grasp this properly, we need
to recognize that number is itself plural. There is the kind of number
we use to count with, and therefore to assign values, for example by
maintaining the difference between the one and the many. This is
number in the service of difference, number that we can count on.
But we have seen that there is another dimension of number. This
is the giddiness of number as pure, unrelieved and, so to speak,
indifferent differentiation. To be sure, there is a kind of dissolute
exhilaration in this indifference, but we saw in Chapter Three that
there is a horror too – the horror of losing count, of being given over
to number without being able to count on it. This is not life asserted
against death, but death come uncountably, unaccountably, to life.
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It is not death driven back by life, but life inundated by the death of
the indifferent. Laughter is not gaiety in the face of death, but death
itself made facetious.
Beckett’s laughter appears like a relief from what surrounds it, and
therefore the guarantee that things are not really as serious as all that.
But the refusal to contain laughter comes to the same thing as the
refusal to allow it. This is not a laughter that punctures logic, but one
that steps into its place. A text like Watt, which becomes a mechanical
laughter-machine, an algorithmic risus sardonicus that does not undo
death but rather does its grim, grinning work, is only the most extreme
demonstration of a general characteristic of comic writing.
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We work so hard at laughter in order to overcome it, rather than

to overcome with it. If laughter comes from the eruption of nothing
in the place of something, laughter is also the defence against the
propagation of this nothing. Where laughter propagates, we seek
through our routines of comedy – in the regulated rhythms of the
joke, for example – to contain, drain and exhaust it. We laugh to fend
off death by laughing, we laugh to have done with laughing, in a con-
trolled explosion rather than a general conflagration. Laughter is a
locking together of the machinery that laughing itself looses. That
is why laughter, apparently and allegedly the dissolution of power,
in fact usually works to solidify and concentrate it. Laughter is less
colonic irrigation than colonial occupation. A wise lecturer takes
care to laugh his lecturees into concupiscent acquiescence. The urge
to pass a joke on is the urge of the crowd to become more of a crowd,
to exclude nothing that it does not already contain.

Measures of Pleasure
Though laughter characteristically gives pleasure, and is usually
associated with it, laughter and pleasure are not entirely identical.
Indeed, there is a calculative aspect to this relation: beyond a cer-
tain point, being helpless with laughter can come close to pain.
Pleasure has the reputation for being spontaneous, unreflective. But,
if the mechanics of jokes make the quantical aspects of laughter-
production particularly evident, this should not blind us to the fact
that pleasure must also be taken, which is to say, taken account of.
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Dickens captures this very well in Martin Chuzzlewit, in a scene in

which the character Tom Pinch sits in a bar in Salisbury:

All the farmers being by this time jogging homewards, there

was nobody in the sanded parlour of the tavern where he had
left the horse; so he had his little table drawn out close
before the fire, and fell to work upon a well-cooked steak
and smoking hot potatoes, with a strong appreciation of
their excellence, and a very keen sense of enjoyment. Beside
him, too, there stood a jug of most stupendous Wiltshire
beer; and the effect of the whole was so transcendent, that
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he was obliged every now and then to lay down his knife and
fork, rub his hands, and think about it.28

That this is a comic moment might aptly remind us of Freud’s

complex negotiations with the economies of laughter. We have seen
that the essence of the Freudian theory of the comic, which signifi-
cantly is not focused on the unbound energies of spontaneous hilar-
ity, but on the geared machinations of the joke, is that it involves the
differential investment of quantities of psychic labour, in order to
manufacture a tension that can be profitably released as laughter.
This is a local application of the general economic principle in Freud
that there is no pleasure without the overcoming or outflanking of
obstacles.
Pleasure is never simple – it is always in fact duplicitous (at
least). In this it does not resemble pain, which is immediate, self-
announcing and self-interpreting. Pain can be diffuse, and difficult
to describe, but there is rarely any doubt that it is there. Perhaps this
is why pain has so often been thought of as the guarantee of the real,
for example in Fredric Jameson’s stern announcement that ‘History
is what hurts. It is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to
individual as well as collective praxis.’29 Pleasure and the desire for
it seem, by contrast, much less certain or self-evident, and much
more intrinsically difficult simply to experience. You seem to have,
like Tom Pinch, to give it some thought.
Whereas pain saturates and yet also abolishes time, pleasure is
intimately intermingled with temporal experience, from which it
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borrows. The anticipation of pleasure, even if it is in the negative

form of the retreat of pain, gives tone, texture, tension and extenu-
ation to time. It is hard to think of a pleasure that does not involve
or require some kind of protention or retrospection. So, where pain
is absolute, pleasure is relative. Pleasure can never be wholly en-soi, or
in itself, it must always be in part pour-soi, for itself, which is to say,
it must involve some minimal form of reflexivity. It is for this reason
that it seems to make sense to say that one might suddenly become
aware that something is or was pleasurable, but it does not seem easy
to conceive how one might be in pain without realizing it. One might
say that pleasure is never fully aware of itself, that it is not until it is
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represented in some way that it can be recognized as pleasure. Pleas-

ure is always compound in form, that is, it always involves some kind
of estimation or taking stock. This implies that travail or difficulty
are not the opposites of pleasure, but part of its repertoire.
One of the principal forms of pleasure’s reflexivity is its self-
subjection to metric and quantification. The conjoining of work,
pleasure and number is nowhere better evidenced than in the
development of modern sport. Before the massive and ramified
codification of sports that took place in the later nineteenth century,
almost exclusively in England, not insignificantly the most advanced
industrial nation in the world at that point, little account was taken
of measurement or scoring in sport.30 A medieval football match
between two villages, which might last all day and lead to many bro-
ken heads and limbs, ended when one team scored. There was no
opportunity to go for an equalizer, no change of ends, no best-of-
three or penalty shoot-out. Victory was absolute, crushing and final.
Though we may try to pretend that we have lost something vivid and
precious in the replacement of the all-or-nothing excess of carnival
sports by rules and scoring systems, in fact this is part of a process
of redistributing the capital of pleasure. The pleasures of the exces-
sive, immoderate and transgressive, as promoted influentially, for
example, in the work of Georges Bataille, are often, perhaps usually,
both anti-democratic and aristocratic.
A contrast is detectable between pleasure and pain in respect of
measure. Where measurement can help to control or diminish pain
(assigning to a particular pain a value on a scale running from one
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to ten, for example), measurement can be and is commonly used

to intensify and prolong pleasure. The work of Freud provides some
of the richest material on the economic structures that pleasure em-
ploys, or that subjects employ to get or keep or manage pleasure.
Measurement is a form of management.
That the economics of pleasure can extend far beyond the co-
ordination of work and leisure is demonstrated in Peter Sloterdijk’s
arguments in his Rage and Time (2010) for the constitutive role of
anger management in twentieth-century politics. Anger, he points
out, tends to ecstatic but politically wasteful eruptions of tension-
reducing violence. If anger – the resentment of the proletariat at their
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systematic immiseration, say – is to be turned to political account, it

must be concentrated and coordinated. Anger is a kind of affective
capital that must be accumulated in anger-banks. This borrows from
the logic of Christian eschatology, which requires the put-upon soul
to suffer and be still, keeping their anger in trust with the Deity, who,
declaring ‘Vengeance is mine,’ monopolizes all anger until the final
apocalyptic purgation of the Day of Wrath. But now it is the Party or
the State that monopolizes the right to express anger, but must also
ration it, in order to keep the anger-banks well stocked. The pleasure
and unpleasure of anger are subject to the most complex kinds of
coordination.31
We have convinced ourselves, especially the we that is presup-
posed and presumed upon in a gathering of non-mathematical per-
sons, that, whatever else it may do, the mathematization of the world
must pose a threat to our humanity and freedom. ‘I am not a number,’
roars the Patrick McGoohan character at the beginning of each
episode of the 1960s cult series The Prisoner, ‘I am a free man.’ If there
is one solidary article of faith among those in the humanities, it is
that there is a deep and dangerous antagonism between the realm
of number and the realm of words and images. The realm of the
qualitative must be secured against the deadening incursions of the
quantitative. The presence or prominence of number is the great
discriminator between the sciences and the humanities. The more
the realm of number expands, we fear, and thereby also reassure
ourselves, the more the realm of the human diminishes. We know it,
we are sure of it, we have no need to think about it any more, indeed
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we cannot waste or risk time thinking about it, lest we cease to be

able to think with it. But might one risk the suggestion that we find
it hard to associate pleasure and number because we are so many of
us casualties of an educational system, sustained by a long and
blundering set of prejudices, that failed to make this association
possible?
In his Art of Discovery of 1685, Leibniz looked forward to the day
when calculation might take the place of disputation: ‘The only way
to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the
Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when
there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate
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[calculemus], without further ado, to see who is right.’32 A defining

strain preparing for the contemporary allergy to number in the
humanities is the Romantic protest against the powerful efforts to
put social and political reasoning on a firm basis by employing cal-
culative reason, especially in the philosophical form of utilitarianism,
so influentially attacked by Dickens.
Jeremy Bentham was not the first, but was certainly the most
systematic and influential exponent of utilitarian philosophy, that is,
the philosophy that insists that the value of anything is to be defined
wholly and without residue in terms of its utility, or its tendency to
produce ‘benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness’.33 As an
unrepentant utilitarian, if also, I hope, a more versatile one than
Thomas Gradgrind, I must declare myself one of Bentham’s sect.
Quantity and measurement are at the heart of utility, since the utility
of an action or idea arises when ‘the tendency it has to augment the
happiness of the community is greater than any which it has to
diminish it’ (Introduction, 3). Bentham did in all earnestness, and to
the quick derision of many, propose what he called a ‘felicific calcu-
lus’ that would allow one to calculate the exact quantity of pleasures
and pains. Since Bentham’s single governing moral principle was
the production of pleasure and the reduction of pain for the greatest
number, such an effort at quantification was unavoidable.
The felicific calculus is set out in Chapter Four of his Introduction
to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), which is entitled ‘Value
of a Lot of Pleasure or Pain, How to Be Measured’. There he distin-
guished seven different dimensions of the pleasures or unpleasures
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that might be produced by a given action. These dimensions were:

1) the intensity of the pleasure or pain; 2) its likely duration; 3) its
certainty or uncertainty; 4) its propinquity or remoteness; 5) its
fecundity, by which Bentham means ‘the chance it has of being
followed by sensations of the same kind’; 6) its purity, that is ‘or the
chance it has of not being followed by sensations of the opposite
kind’; and, finally, 7), its extent, that is, the number of persons whom
it may affect (Introduction, 30). Bentham even produced a mnemonic
jingle (not very mnemonic) to help his students keep this algorithm
in mind:

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Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure –

Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure.
Such pleasures seek if private be thy end:
If it be public, wide let them extend.
Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view:
If pains must come, let them extend to few. (Introduction, 29)

Moral reflection is thereby reduced – or maybe raised – to math-

ematical reasoning. The usual, and right, thing to say about the
hedonic calculus is that it is impossible to do the sums. The usual,
but erroneous, thing to say about why this is so is that pleasure and
number are inimical, or that pleasure is unquantifiable. It is true that
one of the real problems with Bentham’s calculus is its presupposi-
tion of some common measure or single currency, which would
allow one in principle to add and subtract between these different
qualities. Bentham was frank in his acknowledgement that the
closest approximation we have to this common measure is money.
It is perhaps for this reason that utilitarian philosophers have some-
times adopted the terms hedons and (inspired coinage) dolors for
the units of felicific currency. In the course of a discussion of the pro-
portioning of offences and punishments, Bentham deals with the
objection that ‘passion does not calculate,’ to which his sturdy and
straightforward response is that it is not true. The Benthamite reply
to the objection that we cannot quantify pleasure is simply that we
so manifestly and continuously do:
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When matters of such importance as pain and pleasure are

at stake, and these in the highest degree (the only matters,
in short, that can be of importance) who is there that does
not calculate? Men calculate, some with less exactness, in-
deed, some with more: but all men calculate. I would not say,
that even a madman does not calculate. Passion calculates,
more or less, in every man: in different men, according to
the warmth or coolness of their dispositions: according to
the firmness or irritability of their minds: according to the
nature of the motives by which they are acted upon. Happily,
of all passions, that is the most given to calculation, from
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the excesses of which, by reason of its strength, constancy,

and universality, society has most to apprehend: I mean that
which corresponds to the motive of pecuniary interest.
(Introduction, 187–8)

The real problem with the felicific calculus is not that it enforces
calculation where none is possible, but that there are so many ways
of doing the calculations. The problem is not that the felicific calcu-
lus is too rigid and inapplicable to the circumstances of pleasure, but,
as Wesley C. Mitchell observed many years ago, that it is too obliging
to them.34 But this does not diminish the fact that pleasure and meas-
ure are in fact tightly intertwined. Far from being the adversary of
number, pleasure is, in some ways, its apotheosis.

We Can Work It Out

One of the great sources of pain attaching to the question of
pleasure is that we persist in thinking of pleasure as the inverse of
work. The harder we work, we reason, the less pleasure we have;
the less work we do, the more pleasure we will have. We should be
watchful whenever we find ourselves reasoning on the basis that
anything is the opposite of anything else, but particularly when it
comes to pleasure. Since pleasure is the motive principle of every-
thing we do, it finds ways of inveigling itself into everything that
seems inimical to it. When I was a student, I had a number of menial
jobs in factories and the like, and, though it was not particularly
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exacting, I found the tedium of the work hugely depressing and

fatiguing. Like many another worker, the way I found to reduce
these pains was not to shirk and skive, but actually to throw myself
into the work. I had, say, to spend all day on the de-burring machine,
a lathe-like wheel that removed the rough snags on the side of the
little rectangles of copper – destined ultimately to become printed
circuits – that another machine had stamped out. I stood at the
wheel with a pile of copper rectangles beside me which was almost
my height, and my job was to de-burr them. It was easily possible
to do four or five of these a minute, but it was very hard indeed to
carry on doing four or five a minute for sixty minutes an hour and
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for seven hours a day. Still, if I set myself the task of doing, say, six
or seven a minute in spurts, things changed. Simply varying the
number of copper rectangles I managed to de-burr a minute some-
how sweetened, yea, de-burred the task itself, just a little, but, given
its soul-corroding monotony, a little was more than enough. And,
of course, once I realized that I was getting better at the task, and
was regularly achieving rates of six or seven a minute, I began to
wonder whether I might not be able to do eight for, say, three or
even four consecutive minutes. This required vigilance and planning.
I needed to bring my performance under Taylorian scrutiny, assess-
ing the ways in which I picked up the copper oblongs, and even the
order in which I did them (long side first, or short side first?). I laid
wagers with myself, devised inducements and rewards for pro-
longed good performance. For example, after ten straight minutes
of eight a minute, I would have made a profit in copper rectangles
of between fifteen and twenty, and therefore in the currency of time
of between two and three minutes, which gave me the opportunity
to roll and partially consume a cigarette (this was a long time ago,
when smoking was a necessary and expected part of any kind of
organized labour).
By subjecting my performance to mechanical survey, and calcu-
lating outcomes and margins, I escaped the condition of mechaniza-
tion to which I was otherwise painfully delivered. At the same time I
discovered a further source of pleasure in the reckoning itself. Even
if I flagged and failed to reach my targets, even if the exhilaration of
performing eight breakneck de-burrings a minute began to pall, I
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had at least the fact of the calculative perspective open to me. I had
a critical relation to the work I was doing, a relation that, insofar as
it was calculative, was in fact playful. Because I was not reduced to
my work, I was in fact no longer alienated from it. It was my work,
no longer the work I had to do (was required to do), but the work I
had to do (was on hand for me to do). I had thus defeated the
purpose of the task, as it seemed to me, which was to obliterate any
possibility of my being or doing other than the task itself, and to
isolate me in the ongoing, outgoing, agonizingly homogeneous,
oleaginously oozing present of the work. The conjoining of my
exertion with estimation had brought time under tension; it had
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turned my labour into a project. I was not just calculating my

pleasure; I was pleasing myself with my calculations.
All students and newcomers to circumstances in which not very
demanding work must be done at a steady rate over a sustained
period will sooner or later discover the pleasure of subjecting things
to measure in order to vary the beat. And most of those tyros will also
sooner or later be made forcibly aware that there is in fact a further,
complicating calculation to be made. For I was going to be working
in that factory for, at most, six weeks. The people I was working
alongside had been in the job for years and much depended for them
on their being able to remain in it for many further years (this was a
long time ago, when having the same job for years was regarded as
a kind of curse). Most of them had found the optimum level of per-
formance, that balanced out all the countervailing pressures and
could be sustained, day in and day out, over long periods, even, if
necessary, lifelong. Though it might well be possible for them to
match the blistering rate of production to which I aspired and which
I was able intermittently to attain, I was like a quarter-miler setting
the pace for a marathon, and it was not going to be possible for them
to maintain that rate for the rest of their working lives. I had to be
stopped, and, of course, I was. I was forced, by means of various
machinations and ethical humiliations, to ease off, and the work be-
came again, as it had been at the beginning, slow-dripping torture.
I had discovered that it was easier to work hard than to take it easy,
indeed, that, under many circumstances, ease is agony.
I realized that what mattered was not the quality of life that was
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achieved and how the chances of it were distributed under a given

social arrangement. Nor did it fundamentally matter that the people
who did most of the work did not get most of the profit, important
though that is. What mattered, for the Romantic Morrisian I became,
well before ever reading any of the insipid works of the admirable
William Morris, was not the profit that might be made from work,
but the quality of the work that it was possible for people to do, or,
at least the quality of the relation they had to their work. I was about
to go to university to study English, and, whenever I was faced with
learning a list of Old English verb inflections, or slogging my way
through The Faerie Queene, the Morte D’Arthur, or, for that matter, the
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wearisome News from Nowhere, I infallibly remembered my hours and

days at the de-burring machine, and knew that I was in fact in Para-
dise, compared with the Purgatory of not having work of such a kind
to do. The cruellest social divide, I thought, is not between people
who are well and badly rewarded for the work they do, but between
people who have work that they would do anyway for nothing, and
people who would give almost every penny they earned not to have
to do the work they do to earn it.
There are, of course, under some circumstances, pleasures to be
had from the remission of or abstention from work. But the receding
of work altogether leads to the kind of nightmare that opens up for
Philip Larkin in his poem ‘Toads Revisited’, which recalls and re-
verses the views of an earlier poem, ‘Toads’. The later poem, written
in 1962, reflects on why it is that, although ‘Walking around in the
park/ Should feel better than work’, there is a creeping horror in the
prospect of ‘Being one of the men/ You meet of an afternoon:/ Palsied
old step-takers./ Hare-eyed clerks with the jitters,/ Waxed-fleshed
out-patients/ Still vague from accidents’.35 ‘Toads’ begins ‘Why
should I let the toad work/ Squat on my life?’ The sadder, wiser,
counterpart poem ends ‘Give me your arm, old toad;/ Help me down
Cemetery Road.’36
Michel Serres evokes the strange interpenetration of hard and
soft work in The Parasite: ‘Work flows from me like honey, like the
spider’s web . . . I work hard, I don’t work at all; it comes easily, just
like what an animal does when it follows its own instinct in doing
this and that. I am a bee, or a spider, a tree.’37 I am my work, I am, as
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the cliché has it, fulfilled by it, because I am not it, which is to say, I
have a non-necessary relation to it. My work can fulfil me only when
it is not wholly me, or I am not wholly it, so that it can actually release
me from the killing condition of having to coincide with myself.
Work is nonalienating when it allows me to encounter and enter into
my own otherness to myself. When I am not my work, when I am, as
we so idly say, alienated from it, when my work is merely what I must
do, in order that I have the wherewithal to be able, in some other
time and place, after work ceases, to buy back my pawned life, then
I am alienated, not from identity, but from this possibility of non-
self-coincidence. It is not that one relation to work is qualitative and
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the other merely quantitative, as we might sluggishly think; it is that

one gives the opportunity for complex forms of measure, which is
therefore to say, pleasure, and the other does not, beyond the bleak
equality of 1 = 1, I am that I am, I am that which I must do.
Much of our contemporary difficulty with pleasure comes from
the fact that the relations between work and leisure have become so
blurred and uncertain. The response we should make is not to try to
clarify or reassert the difference, but to enter into it. Because we are
not as sensitive as we might be to the complex economies of work
and play, our reasoning about the kinds of reasoning that are at work
all the time in our experiences of work and leisure, and the pleasure
that runs back and forth between them, is often fuzzy and feeble, and
so not nearly enough fun.
For perhaps the thing that gives us the greatest difficulty with
pleasure is that pleasure has no obvious or permanent contrary. This
is because of the many ways in which pleasure proves itself able to
get on the other side of itself, to inhabit and turn to its own account
the many things that seem lethal to it, even and especially, as Freud
shows in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, death itself. It is not possible to
be any kind of rational human being without some complement of
masochism, the deriving of pleasure from pain or, perhaps more
precisely, the intensification of pleasure through it. Human beings
have been characterized as the only species that voluntarily eats chilli
peppers – Homo capsaicus.
If we have difficulty with pleasure, it may come from the increas-
ing abundance and availability of pleasures, forcing more and more
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people to internalize the limits and forms of regulation that scarcity

had previously provided, as well as from the formalization of pleas-
ure that is a concomitant feature of the increasing abundance. This
has produced a kind of Romantic blur and blunder about the ways
in which pleasure is in fact intertwined with number and measure.
Rather than attempting to rescue or purify pleasure from the diffi-
culties it has got into, I have wanted to emphasize the paradoxical
fact that pleasure is in fact entangled with, and even in some sense
dependent upon, difficulty. If we have difficulty with pleasure, this
is in part because we seem constituted to get such pleasure from dif-
ficulty. Rather than an idealizing or essentializing quarantining of
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absolute pleasure, I recommend an enhanced utilitarianism, which

cleaves to the principle that only utility can determine value, but also
recognizes that there is no single unified currency, or principle of
mensuration, by which pleasures can be totted up, even as pleasure
is, ab initio, and ever more irreducibly as time proceeds, utterly
suffused by quantity and number. Leibniz was right, though not for
reasons of which he is likely to have approved. If we are to under-
stand and account for our pleasure, then measure is indispensable.
Calculemus.
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 7
Playing the Nu m b e r s

One of the most important of the ways in which we have come to live
in and through numbers is through the heightened awareness of risk
and probability that characterizes modern experience. All human
cultures are intensely aware of the risks and dangers to which they
are exposed, and concerned to anticipate and mitigate them as much
as possible. One might even define a culture as the effort to reduce
unpredictability, to create what is in a state of nature highly improb-
able, namely a maximum of predictability. Many civilizations have
counterposed ordering functions like law, custom and religious
ritual to the terrifying effects of unruly or chance events. But most
have done so in terms of the contrast between absolute law and com-
pletely unpredictable chaos – destiny, as it were, and fickle fortune.
All that changed in the course of the seventeenth century. Suddenly,
chance seemed to become calculable. Chance has become more
and more a matter of specific probabilities, expressed above all in
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numerical ratios. As chance has progressively become a matter of

number, so probability has become an important and powerful
branch of mathematics. Where number had previously been identi-
fied with the definite, it now moves between, and itself mobilizes,
the definite and the indefinite.
This chapter concerns itself with the challenge to the under-
standing of artworks represented by the numbers games of prob-
ability. It considers first of all the changing nature of literary texts,
and then examines the pressure that the mathematics of probability
have been putting on art and art criticism from the late nineteenth
century onwards.
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When I read a book, what are my chances, or, as one might as

well say, what are its chances, that I will get to the end of it? If I do,
how likely am I to have read it all with optimal attentiveness? Will I
have been able to read it concentratedly, all in one stretch, or will
I have been plagued (or relieved) by interruptions? If I do finish it,
will I ever return to it, and, if so, to reread all or merely part? None
of these factors ever features in my thinking about or teaching of
literary texts, though they may sometimes be mentioned when dis-
cussing study skills (always try to read in a good light, away from
distractions, and with a pencil in your hand). The text is hitched, in
a marriage made in the heaven of readerly and critical conception,
not only with its ideal, predestined reader, but with its ideal
prescribed reading. If we do not finish a book, it is we who have
come up short, not it. It is not so much that we do not attend to these
matters, as that we regard them as in principle neither worth attend-
ing to nor in practical terms the kind of thing of which it would be
possible to take account. They are purely contingent factors.
To be sure, ‘the reader’ does make occasional appearances in
literary theory and criticism, as does ‘the viewer’ in discussions of
art, though my focus in most of this chapter will be on readers of
texts rather than works of art more generally. This reader is said to
be ‘situated’ in various ways, which means that they can be assumed
to come at the text from various predictable or predetermined angles.
Sometimes, this reader is said to be ‘plural’, unresolved, resistant,
refracted, refractory or cross-grained. But, in order to be spoken and
written about at all, in the manner in which it appears such things
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are required to be written and spoken about, the reader has to be

brought over from the side of contingency to that of necessity. The
contingency of a reading is construed as a determined, predictable
or necessary contingency. But the point about contingency is pre-
cisely that it is not fully predictable. It is not only a contingent matter
what sort of reader or viewer I am (most critical writers seem able to
distinguish only a small number of these sorts – gender, ethnic affili-
ation, class, sexuality and degree of disability just about cover it), but
a fully (which of course is always also to say, partly) contingent
matter how far I will on any particular occasion in fact conform to
these determinations.
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Just occasionally, rumours of this contingency can penetrate to

the interior of the literary text, as in addresses to the reader of various
kinds, or in the permission that artists will often magnanimously
grant to viewers to make of their work what they will (thanks for that,
but I was going to anyway). The form of literary fiction might partly
be determined by its effort both to acknowledge and to head off the
liability to interruption that long texts are almost by definition heir
to, not by attempting to keep the reader grimly glued to the reading
from beginning to bitter end, but by conceding the strong likelihood
of interruption and encouraging the reader to synchronize his inter-
ruptions with those provided by the text, in a kind of preemptive
choreographing of contingency.
On the whole, however, literary criticism acts almost entirely as
though it were functioning in the domain of law and necessity. In
fact we might define the concept of a text, or The Text, as the ren-
dering of the contingency of reading as a necessity. This might well,
I think, strike us as odd, given that most of us would regard the
investigation of reading and writing as much closer to the grain and
fluctuations of things than, say, the pursuit of mathematics, or the
measurement of air pressures. Not only this, literature itself seems
to take as its subject, not the sphere of necessity but what Thomas
Hardy calls ‘change and chancefulness’.1
Those who have written about the relation between literature and
probability have tended to do so in terms of the ways in which
probability features in it, or of its ideal reader’s response to it. In
Robert Newsom’s A Likely Story: Probability and Play in Fiction (1988),
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for example, the word ‘plausibility’ might be substituted throughout

for ‘probability’, since it is concerned almost exclusively with the
ways in which fiction represents conditions of doubt or uncertainty,
mobilizing forms of probabilistic judgement in its readers.2 Its con-
cern is therefore to explicate the effects of a background of ideas
about probability on literary writing, and the ways in which those
perspectives then feature within that writing, especially the fictional
realism of the seventeenth century onwards. The questions asked
concern the judgements that can be made about the likelihood, life-
likeness or convincingness of the actions of characters or depictions
of worlds in literature. But all of this occurs within the dubiously
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determined and the determinately dubious space of the literary

text. The concern with the ways in which probability is deployed by
literary texts leaves no space for the way in which literary texts might
themselves be exposed to conditions of chance, or themselves
operate within fields of probability.

Playing Literature
The formalized estimation of probability has been condemned by
Nassim Nicholas Taleb as relying on and promoting what he calls
the ‘ludic fallacy’, the idea that events in the world are best under-
stood by formalizing them as games, which is to say with a ‘flat’
background of equal chances.3 Under these circumstances it becomes
possible to solve classical problems like that of how to allocate the
winnings fairly in an interrupted game of chance, on which both
Galileo and Pascal cut their probabilistic teeth, thereby inaugurating
the mathematics of probability. But what might it mean to think of
the work of art or literary text as a game?
There is in fact a substantial history of associating art and play,
literature and game, as well as a slightly less substantial literature in
which game or aleatory procedure is involved in the generation of
artworks themselves. But, though art and literature can explore or
even incorporate gamelike structures and procedures, a game is
never an exposure to the open as such, for there is no open as such.
Indeed, games seem in important respects opposed to pure contin-
gency. All games are in fact determinate generators of indeterminacy.
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The rules of a game may attempt to cover every contingency, but they
can never predict or exhaust it.
This is perhaps imaged in the astragalus, the animal heelbone
which was the favoured form of randomizer for a very long period
among Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and other peoples. The physical
form of the astragalus is a graphic allegory, or what is called a ‘phase
portrait’, of the blending of the determined and the undetermined
in the game that is played with it. The astragalus can land on any one
of its four faces, but, since there is no standardized form of the
astragalus, the chances are not evenly distributed between these two
faces. It is, as we say, weighted or biased in different ways. In the
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Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Game of Knucklebones (Les Osselets), 1734.

classical world, these faces counted for one, three, four and six, the
numbers two and five being omitted. There seems to have been about
a 10 per cent chance of throwing a one or six, and about a 40 per cent
chance of throwing a three or four.4
Every astragalus has two bodies, an actual and a virtual. There is
first of all the bone itself, in the awkward aggregate of its angles and
oddities, the lumpy three-dimensional landscape of likelihood, that
is both given and yet unknowable, or as yet unknown, wholly appar-
ent, yet entirely unpredictable. Play begins. Imagine please that there
is one who is recording the sequence of throws as they are called out
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who cannot see the game and has no knowledge of the shape of the
astragalus. For a long time, he can tell little or nothing of the shape
of the astragalus from the sequence of throws. But slowly, even
inexorably, over time, and after many, many throws, assuming the
willingness or capacity to keep perfect records, the ghost of the
astragalus’s shape, the abstract law of its distribution of possibility,
may begin to emerge. Putting the astragalus in play will expose its
physical form to randomness, which will initially scatter that physi-
cal form into indistinctness, giving the astragalus something like the
perverse shape of contingency itself. But the pure contingency that
at first scrambles the shape of the astragalus slowly starts to
reassemble its form, albeit now translated into a kind of numerical
distribution, a little as the scribblings of the crayon reveal an other-
wise indistinct form in a brass-rubbing. Eventually, one’s data on
outcomes will start to come together in a kind of virtual astragalus,
a distribution of probabilities that will be the stochastic silhouette
of the original.
It might seem at first as though the rather ungainly shape of the
astragalus would make it harder to guess its shape, but in fact this
will tend to make it easier. The uniform haze or blizzard of random-
ness will make the oddity and unpredictability of its knobs, ridges
and declivities stand out more clearly than that of a more regular
shape, just as a word is easier to guess when one has only consonants
as opposed to vowels, since consonants are less common than
vowels – one uses the abbreviation ‘rptn’ for the word ‘representa-
tion’, not ‘eeio’. A shape that is closer to equilibrium, which is itself
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more likely to generate random or unpatterned results, will keep its

head down much longer in the hail of circumstance. A roulette wheel,
or a ball, may escape detection for very much longer than a coin or
die. You may recognize in what I have been describing something
like the process involved in guessing the nature of the Enigma
machine by the codebreakers at Bletchley, who were faced with the
problem of inductively determining the physical construction of an
encoding machine that was designed to produce randomly scram-
bled outputs using only those outputs themselves – by indirections
finding direction out. In both cases, the sheer mass of random out-
puts allows a slow building of a determinate shape, instrument or
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process. Something like this process has also been put to work in
modelling procedures – for example the simulation of biological
processes like the human immune system.
A game is a putting into play, in an attempt to model this emer-
gence of necessity from contingency. But where the conditions of a
simple game are given in advance, and its possible outcomes limited,
there are many kinds of game situation in which what is being
sought through the play is not just the shape of a particular object
that the game puts into play, but the shape of the game itself. I think
that a more quantitative outlook on interpretable artefacts may make
it ever more interesting to think of reading literary texts, or, for that
matter, watching a film or listening to music, as just this kind of
playing of a game, where the nature of the game itself is only semi-
determined, or itself must emerge stochastically from its playing. We
are accustomed to a much simpler kind of model of literary texts and
their reading. On the one hand, there is the text, which is a given; on
the other, there are its readers and their readings.
In the case of a literary text, what one is attempting to model
through the trial and error of reading-play is the act of modelling
which is reading itself. It is as though the challenge now were not to
use the distribution of outcomes to model the astragalus alone but
also to model the conditions under which the game is being played
– the kind of surface on which the astragalus is being thrown (a
sandy floor? a table with a tilt? a counterpane? a tray in a chariot
being drawn by two skittish chestnut yearlings?), the number of
players there are, and their idiosyncratic throwing styles (how high
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does each player throw the astragalus? how far does it usually roll?).
In the first case, there is complete information, and the possibility
of a complete mapping of the probabilities; in the second, the infor-
mation is incomplete, and the judgements necessarily inductive.
In every game, there are perhaps two contrary motivations that
the playing of the game itself ties together. The first is the desire to
create conditions of randomness. The second is to use those condi-
tions of randomness to disclose the game’s own essential form. A
game always asks the question ‘What kind of game am I? What is
possible within my limits? How much play do I allow and afford?’,
inviting the bringing of necessity out of contingency. The point of
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playing a game is not only to win at it, but to figure out in the process
what sort of game it is. And, we will see, this question is always asked
in a looped future perfect tense, or what is called in French the future
anterior: thus ‘What kind of game will I turn out to have been?’ ‘What
kind of play will have been afforded by the kind of game I will have
been revealed to be?’ This doubleness is indicated by the fact that we
use the word ‘game’ both for the set of rules and procedures that
constitute a game (the game of chess) and a particular episode of
playing, or actualization of the possibilities of the game (a game of
chess). The two meanings of game, those signified by the definite
and indefinite articles (the game of chess and a game of chess), are
always both in play.

Sequence and Ensemble

One of the greatest difficulties in making sense probabilistically of
literary texts, which might be thought of in some ways as singular
historical events, is the incommensurability of sequence and en-
semble in probability theory. Put more simply, this is the principle
that probabilities only apply to large collections of events, and can
only measure the likelihood of certain events occurring over the long
term, as a result of repeated trials, never in the short term, or at a
particular point in a sequence. Probabilities predict what happens
on large scales and cumulatively in collections of events. They tell us
nothing about the order in which those events are likely to happen.
Toss a coin 500 times, and, even if it comes up heads 499 times in a
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row, there is still a 50–50 chance of it coming up heads again on the

500th toss. If there is a likelihood of a particular sequence of num-
bers being drawn twice in the space of a hundred years, this tells us
nothing about where in the sequence those two numbers are likely
to occur – which means that they are just as likely to appear next to
each other in successive draws as they are at fifty-year intervals.
Our relation to information in particular is more and more a
relation to numbers like this. It is difficult for us to know how to be
of one mind about these numbers, because they slice our existence
in two. Living in a world of abundant information means I have to
be simultaneously in the world of big numbers (ensembles), and the
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world of small numbers (events), of which I myself am one, indeed

the very form that my idea of ‘one’ takes. The most important kinds
of information to which I have access and on which I feel I ought to
be able to act rationally tend nowadays to come in the form of big
numbers – the numbers of people succumbing to stroke, owning
cats, burning coal, voting Conservative or simply existing in the
world – and since you read the phrase ‘big numbers’ a couple of
seconds ago, unless a Person from Porlock has intervened, the num-
ber of people in the world has gone up by 47 (actually closer to 48,
but even numbers sound much more rough and ready than odd). Big
numbers can, I know, in the long term, be counted on. On the small
scale, by contrast, in the world of one thing at a time and one thing
or another in which, as a finite creature skewered in space and time,
I have to live, things are sputteringly, spasmodically erratic. For ex-
ample, on average, global road traffic fatalities seem to chug along
at a rate of about one every 25 seconds, with suicides limping slightly
behind this figure, at around two a minute. But this gives little help
in knowing what my actual chances are as I am poised to cross the
Euston Road. We can assume that, like buses, traffic fatalities come
along in clusters rather than on a regular schedule, with peaceful
lulls in the global death-count for minutes at a time, followed by
spectacular, screeching pile-ups which increase the tally by a dozen
or so at a stroke. Similarly, hovering spoon in hand over my triple-
decker Death by Chocolate, I may reflect on my personal cardiac odds.
I may have a 10 per cent chance of a heart attack in the next five years,
but I have a 0 per cent chance of having 10 per cent of a heart attack.
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Nor can I smooth out the risk by putting it on a sort of existential

tick, since I also have a 0 per cent chance of having 2 per cent of a
heart attack in each of those five years. No, I’m either in for a heart
attack, a whole and juicily irrefutable infarct, or I’m not. The more
information I have, the more I am split between these two forms of
accounting, one to the right and the other to the left of the decimal
point, in one of which I have a 10 per cent chance, and in the other
of which, all along, my chances will only ever have been 0 per cent
or 100 per cent. I am scissored between these two worlds, both of
which indubitably exist, and exist inseparably from each other, since,
after all, the big numbers are just all the little ones added together,
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yet I cannot live, or at least cannot turn out to have lived, in both at
the same time. There is either safety in numbers, or my number is
up. We may recognize in this scission the intersecting orders of
numerology and numerality that have been evoked a number of times
already in this book.
Since probabilities relate to ensembles and not to entities, this
may seem to imply that probability considerations have no purchase
on the individual items we know as literary texts. But there is one im-
portant sense in which the texts we know and denominate as literary
might seem to qualify amply as probabilistic ensembles, namely in
the fact that, by definition, literary texts tend to be experienced more
than once. Putting it at its simplest, literary texts are texts with a
higher than average probability of being reread. The phenomenology
of rereading may not appear much in accounts of literary texts, but
it is its implicit condition. To consider a text a literary text is to sug-
gest that it requires or is liable to rereading, either locally, sentence
by sentence, or paragraph by paragraph, or globally. To say that a
text requires or is susceptible to rereading in these ways is to say that
there is a higher probability of this rereading than with other texts,
not because they are already literary texts, but because literary texts
just are texts that happen to be subject to this higher probability of
pouring rather than poring. We might even see Roland Barthes’
specification that ‘Literature is what gets taught’ (ce que s’enseigne) as
another way of saying that literature is what gets to be reread.5 On
this specification, a literary text is therefore a text that has a high
chance of being treated as a literary text. Literary reading is some-
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times defined as the bringing to bear of a certain kind of attentive-

ness, one that is attuned to questions of linguistic form, for example,
but it really involves any kind of unnecessary or surplus reading, and
the features that it may disclose. And, even if one sets aside the fact
or horizon of individual rereading, the fact that literary texts are texts
that are studied and discussed makes them texts that are experienced
as multiples, as the aggregation (and exchange) of serial acts of read-
ing. We think of nonliterary texts as much more likely than literary
texts to be characterized by average or predictable kinds of response,
but in fact nonliterary texts are much more likely to be experienced
uniquely – that is, once and for all, not in the horizon of predictable
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alternative readings. From this point of view, it is in fact literary texts

that are read by means of the averaging of divergent responses, and
by the diverging of average responses.
For this reason, literary texts ought to be much more responsive
than other kinds of texts to the model of reading as a series of iter-
ated plays, occasions or chances of reading, which in turn makes it
apter than it otherwise would be to think of them as ensembles
rather than singular entities or events. This would make the text
entitled Middlemarch, for instance, something like the rules of a game
of which each reading is the enactment. As one plays the game called
Macbeth or Aurora Leigh, one builds up a map of its probabilistic land-
scape, like the one who tries to intuit the shape of the astragalus or
Enigma machine from the sequence of plays to which it gives rise.
The probabilistic figure that the text cuts, or the stochastic landscape
it seems to delineate, is both actual and virtual; it is never all together
in one place and time, but only ever a set of possibilities, even though
the distribution or physiology of those possibilities may start to seem
indubitable.
And, remembering the analysis ventured earlier, we need to add
this. In reading Macbeth and Middlemarch, we are not just guessing at
the kind of plaything or chance-dealing instrument it is: we are also
guessing at the kind of game we are playing, since there is in this
case no text that really stands outside or before the game begins. One
does not in fact simply put the text into play, since the text is the out-
come or profile of this putting of it into play. The goal, or at least the
process, of a game of Macbeth is to disclose the shape and reach of
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the game called Macbeth. The practice of literary criticism that forms
the background of all the kinds of reading we might think of as
literary is increasingly an agonistic one, in which to read the text is
to decide whether to accede to readings of the text offered by others
or to develop my own, which is what winning at Macbeth might mean.
As one rereads, one encounters and foregrounds the relations
between redundancy, or features of the text with high probability,
and information, namely unpredictability, or features of the text with
low probability. Redundancy is used here not in its everyday sense of
uselessness or unnecessariness, but in the sense employed by infor-
mation theorists, who indicate with it a certain quota of excess or
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repetitiousness. The redundancy of a message is the amount of in-

formation required to transmit the message minus the amount of
information needed for the message itself. Every utterance involves
elements that are not necessary to the specific utterance, elements
that simply register or confirm the fact of the utterance taking place,
or indicate the structure of language. The word redundancy, which
derives from re + undare, to come back in waves, can also mean echo-
ing or resounding, which aptly suggests the role of redundancy in
turning the message back on itself, the channel checking that there
is contact, which is to say, that there is, that it is, a channel, saying
yes, this is a message, are you on the line, are you still receiving me,
do you get it? Without this apparent excess, no message can in fact
be transmitted. In a sense, redundancy can be identified with the
channel or form of the message, which must involve recognizable,
repeatable elements.
No text or message can consist of either redundancy or informa-
tion exclusively, and neither redundancy nor information can exist
independently of the other. There will be features and procedures
that become familiar in the text, and there will also be features and
procedures that we will recognize from the reading of other texts.
These are not given in advance, for our recognition of them will itself
be a contingent matter, which depends upon a number of variable
factors, most importantly how many times we have read the text in
question before or how many other texts one may have read.
These redundant or high-probability features will tend to
predominate and in certain cases may end up by inundating and
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therefore exhausting the text by starving it of information, by which

I mean the emergence of low predictability out of a background
of high probability (we will see soon that, since fields of probability
are not static distributions of value, but as dynamic as weather
systems, a state of high probability can sometimes begin to make
the appearance of low-probability events more probable).
Of course texts do not merely enter the condition of reread or
rereadable texts by fiat. We may perhaps say that all texts wish in
some sense to continue in their being, by which one means, not to
endure exactly, but rather to continue to be subject to replication. I
don’t mean this literally, though there are no doubt some features of
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literary texts and their readings which are partly determined by the
conscious interest of their writers and readers in perpetuating them,
which is to say, converting them from singular into serial entities. In
fact, the wish to remain in being is not to be thought of as program-
ming and impelling the text, but instead as emerging from the
tendency of certain texts in fact to remain in play, or get themselves
reread, as a result of their conformability to changeable sets of con-
ditions. The will to remain in being of a given text is therefore in fact
the probability of its successively doing so. A plant the leaves of
which grow round its stem in a ratio approximating to that of the
Golden Ratio is not deploying this strategy or striving towards this
form as a way of maximizing its chances of survival, though putting
out leaves at these intervals does maximize the amount of sunlight
it can gather and also give it the greatest chance of shutting out the
light from competing plants beneath it. Its will to obliterate its com-
petitors is a retroactive artefact of the fact that it turns out that it
stands a good chance of doing so.
Whether or not a text gets to meet the condition of becoming
thought of as literature, which is to say, a text that will be reread, is
itself a matter, not of ‘pure chance’, a notion that will need a little
later to be put under some pressure, but certainly of unpredictably
variable probabilities. Some texts will achieve rereadability, some
will have it thrust upon them, and some will not – and whether or
not they do achieve it is correlated hardly at all with whether they
aspire to. In fact, though, the idea of continuing in being must be
thought of, like almost everything else in this kind of evolutionary
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perspective, back to front; that is, not as an engine shoving things

forward from behind, but as a property or propensity that gathers
over the course of time, and as a result of replication. The will to
persistence of writing is a back-formation of the fact of its inertia, or
tendency to persistence. The disposition or capacity to replicate is
built into all writing, since it can be read many more times than it
can be written, unlike speech which, until it can be recorded, that is,
until it can become writing, can only be heard as many times as it
can be uttered. Something that happens to survive starts irresistibly
to take on the appearance of meaning or having been meant to. Why
do some texts persist for longer than others? Because it turns out
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they can. Given the in-principle replicability of all writing, and given
also a differential and temporally changeable landscape of readerly
habits, motives and preferences, the chances of all texts lasting the
same amount of time, that is, of there not being texts that last longer
than others, are vanishingly small. Let us not forget the fact that, in
reading, as in the expanding population of grey squirrels or Japanese
knotweed, nothing succeeds like success.
To say that literary texts are ones that are subject to a high prob-
ability of being reread is to say that they are texts that have a more
extended temporal profile, which is more than saying that they
simply last longer than other texts – for it is not a question of simply
persisting, so much as radiating. Radiation does not mean dissem-
ination necessarily; texts do not always decay into proliferation or
polyvocality – they sometimes decay into univocality. In order to
persist as rereadable entities, literary texts need to provoke and
survive significantly variant readings, to consent to seem difficult, in
agreeable ways, to add up.

Lasting
It is certainly true that we should not expect to be able to quantify ex-
actly the fields of probability which condition the chances of survival
and propagation for cultural artefacts and ideas. On the other hand,
we will not be able either to dispense entirely with the notion of
quantity, simply because the qualities that we make out in literary
texts will in the end come down to numbers and frequencies, even if
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they are only specifiable in terms of statistical averages, ratios, esti-

mates and rates of change rather than precise calculations. But this
is in any case the nature of statistical analysis, which offers a way of
calculating on relative rather than exact quantities, a way of getting
as good a fix on imprecision as one can. One example of a kind of
quantitative analysis is that offered in Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps,
Trees (2007). Moretti proposes and explores a mode of ‘distant read-
ing’ that would use long-range quantitative evidence, rather than the
microscopic reading of individual texts, to show the development
over time of what he calls a ‘comparative morphology of form’.6 Though
he does not address questions of probability directly, they are the
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engine of most of the effects that he analyses. His first chapter,

‘Graphs’, maps the distributions and periodicities of fictional genres.
The evidence that Moretti presents suggests that the majority of
fictional genres – the silver-fork novel, the Newgate novel, Imperial
Gothic – appear to flourish for around twenty to thirty years, and
then rapidly and all at once give way to others (Graphs, Maps, Trees, 18–
19). This suggests that genres are related more than etymologically
to generations, in that their lifetimes are synchronized. Moretti’s
proposal is that, though one can sometimes suggest external triggers
for the birth and supersession of genres, generic generations are in
fact internally paced, simply by the rhythm of a group of individuals
who are drawn into solidarity by a particular destabilizing prompt,
then persist by a kind of inertia until their solidarity with each other
begins to weaken:

Once biological age pushes this generation to the periphery

of the cultural system, there is suddenly room for a new
generation, which comes into being simply because it can,
destabilization or not, and so on, and on. A regular series
would thus emerge even without a ‘trigger action’ for each
new generation: once the generational clock has been set in
motion, it will run its course – for some time at least. (Graphs,
Maps, Trees, 22 n.11)

Moretti places his analysis in a medium term that lies between

the micro-time of individual events (particular literary texts, for ex-
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ample) and the macro-time of the Braudelian longue durée. This time
is populated by cycles, for ‘the short span is all flow and no structure,
the longue durée all structure and no flow, and cycles are the – unstable
– border country between them’ (Graphs, Maps, Trees, 14). We might
perhaps, without impoliteness, rewrite structure and flow as redun-
dancy and information. These temporary structures – ‘morphologi-
cal arrangements that last in time, but always only for some time’ –
are formed of probabilities (Graphs, Maps, Trees, 14). To say they last
is to say that they recur, which in turn is to say that they introduce
islands of redundancy or high predictability into fields of relative
disorder or unpredictability.
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As Moretti makes clear, the advantages of this method depend

upon the availability and the manipulability of evidence that in turn
enable us to shift scale in the required way. This does not just involve
the massing together of the individual units we call literary texts into
larger aggregates that allow us to measure distributions. For it is
possible also to try to make sense of the patterns of distribution
across these aggregates of features that are smaller than texts – in
the cases that Moretti offers, the ‘clue’ in detective stories, or the
device of free indirect style. This makes it possible for him to say that
the forms that shape literary history are simultaneously ‘the very
small and the very large’, the motif or, as a structuralist of a certain
stripe might once have called it, the lexeme, and the corpus (Graphs,
Maps, Trees, 76). A quantitatively based literary history of the kind that
Moretti proposes would use the former to generate the latter, with
texts being the carrier-form that drops out of the picture. The ana-
logy might be with the analysis of the distribution of genes and alleles
in different populations, in which the individual bodies that are the
bearers of these genes similarly fade from view. ‘Texts are certainly
the real objects of literature . . . but they are not the right objects of know-
ledge for literary history,’ Moretti claims (Graphs, Maps, Trees, 76). He
may mean by this in part that texts may not provide the best samples
from which to generate large amounts of data.
It is, I think, a promising strategy, which suggests that finding
the right kinds of molecular elements within texts, or other objects
of critical and historical attention, might allow for the determinate
measurement of molar fluctuations. Given that the unit of currency
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of most of the non-mathematical databases in the world today is the

word, for example, we ought to be able to devise a calculus of word
appearances and meanings. The probabilistic spectrum represented
by a single word-entry in the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that it
might be possible to begin to base our judgements on the meanings
and functions of words at particular times on estimations and infer-
ences of probability rather than the crude averaging and rounding
up or vague notions of drift and transition on which we currently rely.
Instead of asking what a word meant in 1594, we might ask what its
chances were of being understood in a particular way. The implica-
tions for larger structures, like cultural or literary historical periods
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or movements, which are themselves also roundings-up (often

relying on hair-raisingly unrepresentative samples, with a cor-
respondingly huge likelihood of error) yet powerfully determine the
ways in which we legitimate our knowledge and judgements, are
immense and mouth-watering.
There will for some time continue to be objections that this is
no more than a new round of positivism that looks to what are fan-
tasized as ‘the sciences’ for a spurious and inappropriate exactitude.
In fact, I think it may be the opposite – namely, a way for the human-
ities to escape the intractable positivism that in fact lurks beneath
its convictions of the approximate and the indeterminable. In this,
the humanities may in fact be borrowing back something they in the
first place lent to the sciences. The ‘social physics’ that is adum-
brated by writers such as Philip Ball is an interesting recall of the
positivism of Quetelet and others who first began to apply statistical
methods and reasoning to the understanding of social phenomena.7
There was certainly a deal of overconfidence in those who thought
prematurely that they had discovered the invariant laws of human
and social behaviour. But it seems highly probable that the social
physics of the early nineteenth century had a decisive influence on
scientists like James Clerk Maxwell, who were faced with the prob-
lem of calculating the behaviour of physical substances, like gases,
in which it was impossible, practically and in principle, to account
for the movements of every single particle, and who drew on statis-
tical thinking in the new social sciences to develop stochastic models
in the physics of matter. When Einstein used probability theory to
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explain the mysteriously erratic dance of pollen granules noticed by

Robert Brown in 1827, and known thereafter as Brownian motion,
he decisively established the importance of statistical physics.8
If we accept, as I think we should, that the study of literature in
its historical context is in fact a study of mass phenomena, and re-
quires the generation of inferences about very large ensembles of
similar and recurring events (a book being read, a symphony being
heard or a picture being contemplated), we should not be indifferent
to the ways in which large ensembles of phenomena have been
analysed in other areas, in order to try to make our models and
methods less bungling and dubious. I would like it if we tried to find
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many more things to count and measure and many more ways of
counting and measuring them rather than develop ever more sophis-
ticated theoretical models that are based upon the most primitive
kind of knock-on, cause-and-effect physics. For the humanities,
especially the theoretical humanities, that aim to model the pro-
cesses whereby cultures and subjects are formed, are locked into a
determinism that is date-stamped about 1750 (though with little
responsiveness to the major advances in probability theory that had
already taken place by that time). The more empirical and historical
forms of the humanities are less arrogant but scarcely less determin-
istic in their understanding of causes and relations. All fail miserably
at any predictive test of their competence and value. Everywhere, we
are asked to believe in the existence of the simplest, most remorse-
lessly linear processes which act evenly, uniformly and predictably.
Interactions of any complexity at all are almost entirely absent from
this writing. Nearly all of these explanations depend upon stagger-
ingly naive faith in the adequacy of the skimpiest and most schematic
accounts of initial conditions to explain outcomes; everywhere, that
is, there is a dependence on what Daniel Dennett calls the ‘mind first’
fallacy, the idea that forms can only emerge from prior models, and
that nothing in what emerges can not have been latent in what it
emerged from.9 The humanities have surprisingly little tolerance
for error, exception, anomaly and emergence, for things that form
from unpredicted and probably unpredictable conjunctures of
circumstances. The only models that count in the humanities are
determinist models in which what happens can only ever be the
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actualization of specific and knowable potentials.

Chance Would be a Fine Thing

Nowhere is this more, or more lamentably, apparent than in the ways
in which the topics of chance and indeterminacy themselves appear
in writing about art and literature. It is perhaps not entirely surpris-
ing that the operation of chance should be presented as the absolute
and incalculable Other of law and determination in this way. The
force of ‘chance’ is fetishized as a power that is alien to every kind
of determination, rather than being threaded through it. Tristan
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Tzara’s well-known recipe for making a chance poem may help us

understand this:

To Make a Dadaist Poem

Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you plan
your poem to be.
Cut the article out.
Now carefully cut out each of the words that make up
this article and put them in a bag.
Shake gently.
Take out each cutting one after another, in the order in
which they left the bag. [sic – but the second clause
of this sentence should clearly come after the two words
in the following line]
Copy conscientiously.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you will be – an infinitely original author
of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated
by the crowd.10

The most immediately striking feature of this text is how much

determination is threaded through its chance operations. To begin
with, one must decide, or, rather, have already decided, how long the
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poem one wants to write must be. Indeed, prior to that decision, one
must already have decided to write a poem, and a Dadaist poem at
that. One must choose one article, and take care to cut round each
of the words in the article. The bag in which the words are to be
reordered is to be shaken ‘gently’ – as though it might invalidate the
result, or skew its chanciness in some way, to agitate it too vigorously,
perhaps by shaking it back into orderliness. One must copy the
words out ‘conscientiously’, and must preserve the order in which
they came out of the bag.
The result is that ‘The poem will resemble you.’ Is this supposed
to be the triumphant consummation of the aleatory operation, or its
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hapless defeat? Perhaps Tzara is suggesting that the vigilant suspen-

sion of everything that might exert conscious influence over the
operation will give access to the unconscious essence of the person
doing the selection (this being a common promise made about
chance operations in Surrealism and Dada). But perhaps he is sim-
ply pointing to the fact that, given the strict armature of the aleatory
ritual, the resulting poem cannot help but be taken as an expression
of the aleator. Perhaps Tzara’s words mean the words thus arbitrarily
assembled will, mirabile dictu, themselves provide a revelation of the
hidden reality of the assembler, which will have been liberated by
the process. But perhaps he might also mean that the miraculous
benediction of the poem will be the very opposite of a chance
occurrence, precisely because it will have been so carefully and
rigorously set up, and because the magical procedure makes it
exceedingly likely that, whatever the result will be, it will be bound,
like a horoscope, to seem like some spooky miracle of aptness.
I think that Tzara’s recipe, which is usually quoted as though it
were itself a poem, though, if so, it would seem that it could not, by
its own design specifications, be a Dadaist poem, is readable (or is
now) as a wise reflection on the trickiness of achieving chance. Pure
chance can only be guaranteed by strict determination, because
‘chance’ cannot be relied upon to happen by chance. So ‘mere’ chance
has a good chance of being impure, contaminated by determination,
in this case the predisposition of anybody likely to engage in this div-
inatory procedure towards making out significance in what results.
Chance, like death, is hard to avoid, until one resolves to embrace it,
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at which point, like death again, it becomes elusive. Furthermore,

the recipe seems to recognize that chance does not stay chance. Like
Lady Bracknell’s ignorance, chance ‘resembles a delicate exotic fruit;
touch it and the bloom is gone’.11 The recipe intimates how difficult
it is to cross over entirely on to the side of chance; seemingly, it is as
hard to get chance into one’s poem as it is to keep it out.
Dadaism was only one of the areas of art practice to become
interested in trying to exploit the operations of chance. This is some-
thing different from simply playing the odds, in the way in which a
gambler might, since a gambler only wins if he is lucky. The sort of
betting on chance engaged in by Dada is of a kind that, as long as
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the chance procedure is constructed carefully enough and the mech-

anisms of the aleatory procedure followed to the letter, the player
of the game cannot help but get lucky, since they will always and
without fail be exposed to the operations of pure chance.
The awareness of ‘chance’ has led to a tendency to reify it. As
well as becoming a substantive, chance has tended to become an
adjectival quality, as in the contemporary use of the word ‘random’,
or in its absurdly intensified form ‘really random’. Here ‘random’
means something like ‘pleasantly unexpected’ or ‘quirkily unpre-
dictable’. But randomness has no specific quality, no defining tone,
hue or cast, for randomness is the absence of any determination
whatever.
The word ‘chance’ does not signal a force of pure randomness.
We have a tendency to think of chance as a kind of loosening or
dissipation that scatters coherence and breaks open regularity. But
chance is not all on the side of incoherence – if it were it could not
have given rise to coherence-creating species like human beings. For,
where habits and regularities form, these are not opposed to chance,
but themselves arise from it. Regularity may be much less probable
than irregularity, but it is not in any sense opposed to or on the other
side from chance. To say that something happens ‘by chance’ sug-
gests something that happens without a cause or reason. But there
is no simple division between things that seem to happen for a
clearly determinable reason, and those that do not. For most of the
things that do have a cause or reason, those causes or reasons are
not absolutely determining, and whether or not they are determining
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is itself contingent. Whether one thing will turn out to be dependent

on another is usually itself dependent on other things still. Only
causes or reasons that are absolutely necessary and not just highly
probable are immune from chance – but there are very few, if any, of
these. There is, as the devout James Clerk Maxwell was reluctantly
obliged to accept, no absolute law decreeing that closed energy sys-
tems move from a condition of lower to a condition of higher entropy,
that is to say, a condition in which, though exactly the same amount
of energy remains in the system, it is distributed in such a way that
less of it will be able to be converted into work. That this will tend to
occur is not necessary, just very, very probable. The Second Law of
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Thermodynamics is therefore no such thing, just a racing certainty.

Every time entropy does in fact increase, it is dependent on the
chance that, once again, the more probable rather than the less will
have happened, when it did not absolutely have to. The chances may
be a squazillion to one that the molecules in a cup of hot coffee will
one day all spontaneously line themselves up into a neat holographic
portrait of Princess Diana shimmering in mid-air, but, since there is
nothing to prohibit it absolutely, every time it does not happen, it
is a matter of chance rather than necessity that it has once again let
us down.
This complexity may put a new complexion on the interest in the
operations of chance that arose in many different art forms at the
beginning of the twentieth century. In an obvious sense, this interest
looks like both recognition of the unavoidability of chance and an
acknowledgement of its generative powers. Artists of many different
kinds have seen an openness to chance as one of the most powerful
forms of resistance, discovery and renewal in a world characterized
increasingly by rational management, and the apparent reduction of
every kind of risk. Others have followed spiritualists, themselves fol-
lowing divinatory history, in seeing it as a path into knowledge of
the unconscious, chance being allegedly a way of outwitting the
sentries and censors of rationality. These powers of resistance and
renewal depend upon a conception of chance as a kind of pure
exteriority to reason, or to the reasoning subject. But chance is in
fact never available as this kind of absolute exteriority, or in any sort
of ‘pure’ form. The art that would make chance an exterior force
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on which to feed will always be liable to encounter the force of

chance as part of its own operations, and intertwined with its most
deliberated purposes.
This is because it is always possible, by chance, that some
disappointingly or suspiciously orderly arrangement might arise in
any undetermined procedure. None of us would be very convinced
if, in response to the request to provide a sequence of six numbers
at random, a program were to generate the sequence 123456, but
there is quite a significant chance of such a sequence arising at
random. As a sometime historian of and speculator on the voice, I
have had occasion to enjoy and endure a number of episodes or
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performances of glossolalia, both in artistic and religious contexts,

in which sounds are emitted that are said to be pure nonsemantic
utterance, or at least to belong to no recognizable earthly language.
The interesting feature of such utterances is that, far from being im-
pelled by the pure language of the spirit, or of the elemental passions,
they always in fact seem to be subject to careful internal monitoring,
so as to avoid the accidental articulation of meaningful words. Given
that many of these words arise from the crystallization of accident
out of the mouths of babes and sucklings in many different times
and climes, it is highly improbable that an entirely unfiltered stream
of spontaneous utterance would not occasionally contain them, yet
I have never heard a glossolalic performer come near to articulating
‘mummy’ or ‘pop’ or ‘bugger’ or ‘haddock’. In order to count as
entirely open, such speech cannot in fact be open to simply anything
and everything. The order of accident must be tacitly defended
against the accident of order.
Seen in these terms, the ideology of chance may be seen as the
effort to disavow this intermingling of the determinate and the
indeterminate – an intermingling that can never itself be fully deter-
minate or calculable, though this does not make it incalculable either.
What we may call the aleator, or artist of chance, is therefore the mir-
ror image of the determinist; where the latter strives to leave nothing
to chance, the former is at pains to have absolutely nothing go to
plan (except that).
Works on the operations of chance in different art forms tend to
focus on the ways in which such forms might or might not succeed
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in surrendering or opening up to a principle that is held to be alien

or antagonistic to its nature. Such a perspective allows one to rest
safe in the assumption that ordinarily chance has no part in the
constitution of the art or culture in question, for there could be no
question of voluntarily opening up to something to which one is
already constitutively exposed.
The enthusiast for the art of chance procedures, convinced that
such procedures produce a different kind of art from other kinds of
compositional procedure, can easily be imagined as objecting in the
following terms. ‘Yes, we can concede that there is an element of
chance in all works, indeed in all actions of all kinds. But surely what
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matters is the degree of indetermination to which a work may be sub-

ject? Surely strongly designed or intended works are much more
likely to exhibit a determinate and predictable form, over which
chance has much less chance to exert an effect, than aleatory works,
which are much less likely to be predictable?’ To take this line would
be to abandon the absolute distinction between absolutely deter-
minate and absolutely indeterminate, but to retain that distinction
nevertheless in a logic of approximation in which works are more or
less, but to all intents and purposes more, determinate, or more or
less, but pretty much mostly, indeterminate.
This way of thinking can indemnify a misunderstanding about
the operations of chance and probability. Call it the ‘aggregative
fallacy’. It is nicely illustrated by an argument developed by Stanley
Fish in response to a metaphorical scenario projected by Ronald
Dworkin as a way of explaining how it is that judges make decisions
based on the history of legal precedents. Dworkin asks us to imagine
a chain novel being written by a sequence of authors, each of whom
reads what has come before and then contributes a chapter of their
own. The first writer, says Dworkin, will be free, because he or she
will operate in a field of unconstrained choice – the chapter they
write can be about anybody, in any setting, and be written from any
point of view and in any style that this frolicking fons et origo may hit
on. As the narrative is handed on and the collective plot thickens,
Dworkin reasons, the choices available will diminish, as successive
authors have to take more and more account of the chapters that
have already accumulated, until finally, for the last writer in the chain,
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it may seem as though there is only one possible concluding chapter

that can be written.
Fish responds, counterintuitively, that in fact there is no differ-
ence, or at least none in terms of the degree of their freedom, be-
tween the first and the last in the chain. The first novelist will be free
to write what they like, but they will be constrained by everything
that is involved in the decision to write a novel, in terms of their
understanding of what a novel is and can do. Nor will the putative
last or penultimate in the chain have any essential advantage or dis-
advantage compared with those who have come before, or not, at
least, in terms of the ratio between their freedom and their constraint.
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For the accumulated pages on top of which they will be sitting will
not in fact be self-interpreting, but will themselves need to be con-
strued. The last in the chain will need to interpret what has come
.

before, and will always have the option of radically redefining his
and therefore his reader’s understanding of what the foregoing novel
is taken to be. Indeed, one might very well say that, given the kind
of thing a novel is, that is, given the fact that sudden swerves of plot
direction, or frame-switching and rug-pulling manoeuvres (it was
all a dream, the detective did it herself ), are so much part of the hori-
zon of expectation of a novel, such radical reinterpretations may
actually start to get more likely the longer the novel goes on. This
means that the Johnny-come-lately in the chain is precisely as free
and precisely as constrained as its prime mover – that is, his freedom
and his constraint are locked together: ‘He is constrained in that he
can only continue in ways that are recognizable novel ways (and the
same must be said of the first novelist’s act of “beginning”), and he
is free in that no amount of textual accumulation can make his choice
of one of those ways inescapable.’12 We can substitute without
significant loss the concepts of determination and chance for the
terms constraint and freedom. Whether determination grows or
diminishes is itself not a given, but will all, always, depend – depend
upon the conditions of making out to which the work is subject.
On this estimate, or in this way of conceiving what is involved in
the act of estimation, it might sometimes be that the strongly
intended or determined work, while being in a straightforward sense
more defended against chance, is for that reason more at risk from it.
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The more set in its ways a novel or artwork may seem to be, the higher
the possible yield of innovation or surprise for both writer and reader.
Thus a text that may seem to have settled for a place in a comfortable
and unchallenging minority niche, giving a modest but regular
revenue of pleasure to its fans – Lady Audley’s Secret as an example of
Victorian sensation fiction, say – can be reconstrued by a feminist
readership as a searching investigation of the politics of the body,
with an interpretative profit in proportion to its unexpectedness
which, for that reason, begins to diminish immediately.
What is often seen as a desirable dividend of innovation in art-
works – largely because of the horizons of interpretation within
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which the things picked out as artworks tend to operate, in which

sudden changes of meaning and value are themselves a premium
source of value – may be seen as an undesirable, even catastrophic,
cost if one is talking about a bank or an air traffic control system. It
is commonly suggested nowadays, for example, that the immune
system of somebody brought up under conditions of strictly con-
trolled hygiene may be unable to cope with the unexpected infectious
or pathogenic agents they may later encounter. By contrast, the
toddler who has consumed their mandatory peck of dirt and has
therefore primed their immune system by exposure to bacterial noise
may be much better defended against unpredictable contingencies.
We may say that the strongly determined work can have the first kind
of immunity. Precisely because it seems so strong, it may in fact be
weak at certain crucial points, and in proportion to its strength. The
strongly or programmatically undetermined work, by contrast, can
come to seem almost immune to accident or the unexpected. In this
respect, systematically randomized or aleatory works may be a little
like the 1980s tv series based on the work of Roald Dahl that was
called Tales of the Unexpected, in which the only thing that could ever
have unsettled the viewer would have been the failure of an episode
to furnish the tediously requisite twist or quirk.
There is another respect in which a strongly determined work
may be regarded as more exposed to unpredictability than an un-
determined one. For a strongly determined work is very likely to con-
join many different kinds of determination, operating with different
degrees of force at different points in the work. The characters might
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be conventional, but the language obscure and highly wrought; the

setting might be stable and unvarying, but the plot subject to lurch-
ing time-shifts; and so on. The probabilities in such a work are
differentially distributed, in something of the way in which, within
a given volume of gas said to be at a certain temperature, there is in
fact a distribution of different temperatures, of which the perceived
temperature is a statistical average. Precisely because it is determined
in so many different ways, and to such different degrees, the strongly
determined work is riddled with entry points for chance fluctuations
to do their work, sometimes prompting local adjustments to restore
equilibrium, sometimes propagating uncontrollably through the
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system. Such a work constitutes a stochastic landscape, full of

chasms and outcrops, slopes, potholes and dimples, in which
chance fluctuations might get a toehold.
But this local differentiation is much less likely to be there in a
programmatically undetermined work, of the kind that might
emerge from the procedure recommended by Tzara, for example.
Here, the probabilities, and the improbabilities, are spread out much
more uniformly. Since everything is designed to be as unpredictable
(‘unpredictable’) as everything else, we can intuit no landscape or
profile of probabilities, no faultlines, no ridges or shaded valleys, no
map of mattering. There is more unpredictability on average in such
a work, but because the unpredictability goes uniformly all the way
down, it is much more predictable at individual points. Where the
strongly determined work has many entry points for indetermination,
the strongly undetermined work only has one entry point for a differ-
ence that would make a difference, which is at the level of the initi-
ating intention to make an aleatory work. This may actually be one
of the reasons why aleatory works are so routinely accompanied by
a justifying framework explaining the precise procedures employed
to produce indeterminate outcomes. The purpose is not to guarantee
the paradoxically broken integrity of the work, but actually to make
available some point of leverage for the work, since, without the pos-
sibility of a difference that would make a difference, the information
quotient of the work would be immaculately null. As a result, the
apparently predictable work may be more at risk from instability;
whereas the giddily unguessable work is in fact metastable, given
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stability, that is, by the very uniformity of its fluctuations.

The system of the completely aleatory work is like the thermo-
dynamic system that is approaching maximum entropy. In thermo-
dynamic terms, as we have seen, entropy is a measure of the amount
of energy that is available to do work in a given closed system: the
higher the entropy, the less available work. In thermodynamic
systems, the capacity to do work is a function of the amount of
organized difference in the system – typically, for example, the sep-
aration of hot from cold molecules. The more disorder in the system,
the less work can be got from it – you can make a heat engine with a
volume of hot gas and a volume of cold gas separated from each
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other, but you cannot make an engine when those two energy states
have been shuffled together. Perhaps this is why the Lord God warns
the lukewarm believer that he will be spewed out of His mouth
(Revelation 3:16). Order here is not entirely subjective or observer-
dependent, for it can be given a mathematical description. An
ordered system is one which can be reduced to and generated by a
formula that is more economical than the system itself; a chaotic sys-
tem is one of which the description would offer no possibility of such
compression, and would have to match the system exactly. Things
drift from order to disorder because, in a given system, the number
of ways of being ordered will always be much smaller than the num-
ber of ways in which it can be disordered. In moving from order to
disorder, therefore, systems move from the less to the more probable,
and maximum entropy equates both to maximum disorder and maxi-
mum probability. This may at first seem curious, given our tendency
to think that disorder ought to be characterized by improbability. The
traditional example of a pack of cards can help us over this difficulty.
There is only one way in which a pack of cards can be ordered such
that the four suits are grouped together and the cards run from ace
through to king within each suit. The number of ways in which the
cards can fail to achieve this state (52!–1) is huge by contrast and
therefore much more likely to occur. So the reason a pack of cards
thrown up in the air never seems to come down neatly arranged in
suits and numerical values is that there is only one way this can hap-
pen, whereas there are billions of ways in which it can fail to happen.
This helps to explain why highly disordered states also tend to
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exhibit what looks like equilibrium; the most likely state for a pack
of cards (or, we might just as well say, a bag of letters) that is subject
to a series of shufflings is one in which the unpredictability is, so to
speak, evenly distributed through the pack.
This can also explain why so many aleatory works are often,
frankly, such a chore, since they offer so few genuine surprises, or,
better perhaps, their surprises are so reliably and routinely ground
out. This might seem to contradict Mallarmé, who declared that ‘Un
coup de dés n’abolira jamais l’hasard’ – ‘a throw of the dice will never
abolish chance’. After the first roll of the dice, the one that decides
that the rest of the work will be generated by rolls of the dice, the
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scope for chance will be much reduced, precisely because the map
of mattering will be so smooth and flat. The maximally randomizing
act is like the supreme action-ending act Cleopatra contemplates:

’Tis paltry to be Caesar;

Not being Fortune, he’s but Fortune’s knave,
A minister of her will. And it is great
To do that thing that ends all other deeds,
Which shackles accidents, and bolts up change.13

And yet there is perhaps another sense in which Mallarmé is in

fact still right. For the very fact that the pleasures of aleatory works
tend to be so insipidly unvarying is not a feature of the works them-
selves, nor a matter simply of the quotient of unpredictability they
contain. It is also a matter of the way in which they function within
particular fields of reception, and of how they work out in the differ-
ent kinds of field in which they are put to work. That is, it is an
exposure to relative unpredictability. We are not dealing with closed
systems here, in other words, but chained or interlocking systems,
in which one system of probabilities is subjected to the force of
another.
I’d like to show this by considering what can happen in practice
to such claims to have initiated or increased the amount of play in a
system. One of the commonest ways in which chance is reified is as
a force of liberation or at least of loosening, which can be employed
to create new possibilities in a world thought to be otherwise cabined,
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cribbed and confined by the iron cage of determination and pre-

dictability. The dream of such a determinate world and the idea of
the liquefying or animating force of ‘pure’ chance dance cheek to
cheek. A good example is furnished by an essay by Natasha Lushetich
which describes some of the events that took place in the Fluxus
exhibition mounted by Tate Modern in May 2008. Fluxus names a
group of artists working in the 1960s and ’70s whose work was char-
acterized by the devising of various kinds of event and performative
procedure. Lushetich writes in particular about the Flux Olympiad, a
series of hacked, hampered and otherwise tampered-with games and
sports devised by Larry Miller. One of the best of these seems to have
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been Beci Hendricks’s Stilt Soccer, which, as its title suggests, requires
its players to play soccer while on stilts. The result is a series of im-
provised methods for trying to retain balance while also pursuing
the goals of the game – and, of course, the game will only achieve
the desired level of agreeable daftness if the players take it seriously,
that is, pretend not to be simply pretending to play football.
This leads Lushetich to the suggestion that the game liberates a
‘fundamental undecidability’, which, parodying more formalized
games and sports, ‘restores playfulness to sport and subverts its
objectification’.14 In this, it is said to be representative of a number
of such aleatory procedures which dissolve the ‘structurality of struc-
ture’, thus providing ‘a nonhegemonic socio-aesthetic practice’.15
Even allowing for the unhelpful smearing of senses in the term ‘non-
hegemonic’, which could mean either ‘non-mainstream’ or ‘non-
authoritarian’, though only the first of these is really accurate, this
judgement seems unexceptionable. Plainly Stilt Soccer is, at least in
some respects, a much looser, much less serious kind of proceeding
than actual soccer. However, I cannot make much sense of the claim
that any kind of ‘fundamental undecidability’ is involved in this pro-
ceeding. First of all, it is governed by rules, just as ordinary soccer is.
Indeed it is governed by exactly the same rules that govern soccer
played in contact with the ground, albeit combined with another rule,
the one requiring the players to walk and run on stilts, that makes
all the other rules harder than ever to follow.
In fact, the intriguing thing about Stilt Soccer is that it is a perfectly
plausible and possibly in time rather a good game, as well as being
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a witty send-up of one. If the results are unlike soccer as usually

played, one has only to observe children who have only just been in-
troduced to the arbitrary restriction of not being able to use any part
of their bodies other than their feet to recognize that the way in
which Stilt Soccer interferes with soccer is a pretty exact recapitulation
of the way in which soccer itself interferes with the ordinary ways of
carrying and projecting a ball. In short, it imposes a restriction that
changes the field of probabilities.
But here is what seems to me to be the salient point. That field
of probabilities (the differentially distributed likelihood of being able
to control the ball with hands, elbows, feet and head) will itself
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always operate within other fields of probabilities, which determine

(but only partially) the ways in which the activity of soccer will be
understood to work. These are often spoken of as defining contexts,
but I think they are much better thought of as fields of probability,
that may strongly predispose certain ways of understanding as
opposed to others, but do not absolutely determine them. We may
not need, or even be able, to attach precise numerical values to these
probabilities, but we cannot think of them with any kind of finesse
without drawing on the mathematics of probability that exercises
such a strong interpretative pull on us. A determining context is not
one that rules out chance but rather one in which there appears to
be a very strong chance that unpredictable things will not occur.
Seen in this way, Stilt Soccer could only ‘restore playfulness to
sport’ if it were itself taken to be a sport, or a way of playing it.16 But
what are the chances of this? How many people look to the Tate
Modern website for details of soccer fixtures? This is the reason that
the event is not a game of stilt soccer, but rather the instantiation of
a prankish art-proceeding called Stilt Soccer. Typography is here a
reliable indicator of typology; one does not go to the Emirates Stadium
to see a work with the title Soccer Match between Arsenal and Chelsea –
except, perhaps, implicitly in those games that are tellingly called
‘exhibition matches’. If it caught on, Stilt Soccer would have some
chance (though even then a smallish one, I’d say) of restoring
playfulness to sports. But Stilt Soccer is, on my estimate, vanishingly
unlikely to have any such effect, since in general multi-billion-pound
sports industries are not much affected by developments in the fields
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of art practice and aesthetic theory. There is obviously a certain kind

of playfulness in Stilt Soccer, but that playfulness is quite strongly
fenced in by where and how it occurred (in a place where art hap-
pens). How far it can restore playfulness to anything will depend
upon how that playfulness is itself put into play, or, as we say, played
out, in different fields of expectation or probability.
This leaves – though one had as well say ‘preserves’ – the possi-
bility of writing about chance not as topic (novels about gamblers),
or as strategy (the work of art employing chance procedures), but as
universal yet universally variable condition, or, indeed, the condition
of universal variability. Chance would then be regarded, not as
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something internal to the artwork, that is, part of its theme or con-
tent, or something outside it to which it is thought to be dangerously
or thrillingly exposed, but as threaded through the very working of
the work itself, as it is put into play. Chance is not on the other side
from determination, it is the very process whereby determination
and chance are distributed. Determination and chance are not to
be put into separate piles and simply totted up, since the force of
determination that a work will seem to exercise or exhibit will itself
be a function of chance.
So we might do well to avoid the bipolar mood swings of
absolute choice on the one hand and absolute chance on the other,
and learn to inhabit what Gary Saul Morson has followed Aristotle
in calling ‘causality for the most part’; as Morson tellingly observes,
‘Books may be called Chance and Necessity, as Jacques Monod’s famous
one is, but I have never seen one called Chance, Necessity, and For-the-
Most-Part Causality.’17 Morson is right to condemn the Leibnizian or
Laplacian determinism that governs ways of seeing society and his-
tory. The name of Laplace is anyway unfairly latched to determinism,
given his great importance in the history of probability theory. But,
even if Laplace is absolved of the blame for determinist thinking,
Morson is right to call this way of thinking ‘crypto-theological’.18
Oddly enough, the humanities and social sciences, though recoiling
from the forms of quantitative thinking characteristic of the exact
sciences, and proclaiming their difference from them in their
embrace of the undetermined and indeterminably particular, in fact
assume and inhabit a world of absolutes that has seemed laughably
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unlikely since Laplace. It is often suggested that human affairs are

not to be understood with the reductive models developed for
understanding processes in the physical world, because those affairs
involve a multi-parameter calculus that is too large and intricate to
undertake with any hope of success. Yet this claim cohabits in the
analysis of social forms and processes comfortably with the explicit
or implicit dependence on models that, while they are nearly always
derived from the analysis of the natural world, are in fact far cruder
and more approximate than any of the models that have been devel-
oped to deal with physical processes over the last couple of centuries.
These metaphor-models are, for example, geological (‘strains’,
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‘faultlines’, ‘eruptions’), or hydraulic (‘currents of influence’), or

meteorological (‘prevailing climates of opinion’) or crystallographic
(complex symmetrical structures of every kind). But such models
would scarcely suffice to describe and predict the bobbings of a
rubber duck in the bath, let alone the movements and tendencies of
human affairs. If these affairs are really as complex as we know they
must be, why cling to such clunky, clanking machineries of mind to
model them?
This dependence on the most reductive kinds of models permits
us to permit ourselves to confuse precision and clarity. As we saw in
Chapter Two, precision in fact requires indeterminacy; it makes
fuzziness unavoidable. Absolute clarity, by contrast, depends upon
approximation. Strangely, then, it is the inexact sciences that depend
on absolutes, and the exact sciences that have long recognized the
need to operate without them. The less exact you are, the more
absolute you may allow yourself to be; the more exact you are, the
less absolute you can afford to be.

The Weather of History

I have begun by speaking about the analysis of individual works, but
this is in order to broach a way of thinking that would apply on a
much larger scale, to the forms of organization we call cultures,
particularly as they may be conceived historically. If the oscillations
of a planet’s magnetic field, the prosody of a dripping tap, the for-
mation of a snowflake, are to be understood as stochastic processes,
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why should we expect human history to line up with the crudely

deterministic models we deploy upon it?
Cultures are sometimes represented as organized sets of princi-
ples, articles of faith which can be plainly articulated, along with the
systems of behaviour to which they give rise – ‘Protestant cultures
value individuality’. But such beliefs and behaviours are never in fact
uniformly adhered to, or even in fact universally mandated, in a par-
ticular culture, though there may be strong pressures towards them.
Cultures are best thought of as climates – climates not only of
opinion but of feeling, belief and action. To be French or female or
fin-de-siècle is to inhabit, and to contribute to, such a climate. But
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that climate is not a given, but rather a set of potentials or prob-

abilities, values towards which things in that setting will tend. This
means that cultures, like climates, are unlikely to have anything
uniquely and finally distinctive about them. It may be that, as has
often been said, a text like Hamlet marks the beginning of a particu-
lar style of intense self-consciousness that had not previously been
part of the way in which individual human beings saw and thought
of themselves, but that from the beginning of the seventeenth cen-
tury onwards would begin to be more common. But it is implaus-
ible and unhelpful to imagine that nobody could ever have felt
anything like Hamlet’s squirming reflexivity before that, or that ‘the
subject’ was born at that moment. This is not just because the tran-
sitions from one era, or prevailing structure of feeling, to another
are slow and irregular. It is also because there is no absolute reason
why a Hamlet-like self-relation might not have arisen in any other
period whatsoever. It may have been quite unlikely, but it could have
occurred; indeed, given the numbers of persons and occasions
involved, it must have, and often. We might think of the possibility
of such events as we would think of the possibility of unlikely
climatic events, say, snow in Sydney. The lowest temperature ever
recorded in Sydney was 2.1ºc, and the last recorded snowfall was
in 1836 (though there are sticklers who insist that this can have
been no more than airborne slush). But this is not enough to justify
the assertion that it never snows in Sydney, only that it is very,
very rare for it to do so, and pretty unlikely that it will do so in the
next, say, hundred years. Cultures are like spread bets, complex
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probability profiles.
Indeed, just as weather systems are not simply independently
occurring events, but tend to feed back on and amplify themselves,
a high-pressure system may prove to be very stable, making it
temporarily much more likely that the weather tomorrow will be the
same as today than it usually is – so cultures will not only make
certain events more likely, but will iterate those events. Indeed, what
we mean by ‘a culture’ may best be thought of, not as a field of
likelihood of certain events happening – the appearance of Hamlet
– but as fields of selective attention that are much more likely to pick
out certain kinds of event as significant than others.
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Still, one might say, as with the weather, that these fields of prob-
ability, though they are always in operation, are necessarily always
prospective. Nobody bets on a race that has already been run. Time
runs from the soft to the hard, from the indefinite to the definite, the
virtual into the actual. Time continually condenses probability into
positivity, possibles into givens, fractions into cardinal integers. The
process of time means that things that did not have to happen keep
happening, and however unlikely they were, they thereafter will
always have happened, though without having had to. This process
itself has something like the force of a necessity; it has to happen
that things happen that do not have to. Non-necessity is necessary.
This may appear to make it mean that probability considerations
actually have no place in the retrospective constructions that we call
history. Of course, it may certainly be that what we find of interest
in a given historical field is strongly influenced by the probability
gradient of our attention, as we selectively pick out and amplify cer-
tain kinds of feature in the field of givens. But it is hard not to believe
that, even though we are exceedingly unlikely ever to be able to access
and know it, there was a ‘fact of the matter’ about everything that
has already happened. The relations we establish with the past may
be variable, but that with which we seek to establish a relation is
surely not. The race has already been run, and, no matter how we
reinterpret the outcome, it can never be rerun and the outcome
decided differently.
History gives every appearance therefore of going from the soft
to the hard. We think of facts – dates, data – as fixed and finite, and
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relations as potential, infinite. There is no limit to what may be made

of the Battle of Trafalgar, and no definitive way of estimating the
odds on any particular way of making sense of it, since these will
depend on preoccupations, and significance-amplifying conditions
that have yet to arise.
This suggests that facts can never be natural events. What’s done
is done, and can never be undone. But the question of what it is that
has in fact been done is not one that can easily be done with. So, in
a certain sense, it is facts that are soft, not relations, or rather it is
relations that make occurrences into hard facts. Nothing that has
simply happened, that is to say happened without having entered
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into some relation of significance, has really happened yet, for there
is as yet nothing for or in terms of which it could be a fact. Things
that have happened only once have not yet happened at all. Only
things that have happened twice – once in the mode of occurrence,
and then again in the mode of recurrence, have happened and then
been seen to have happened – have happened in the first place. This
is not to deny that the events of history have taken place, but it is to
say that these events are potentially infinite, depending as they do
on the future, and therefore without significance.
This means that there can also be no such things as the unique
and wholly unpredictable ‘events’ that contemporary philosophers
such as Alain Badiou evoke. However rare and precious these atoms
of incident may be, they can only be events insofar as they have al-
ready been put into play, retrospectively constituted as events, in the
fields of probability to which they are subjected. Like everything else,
events must take their chances. We think we are on the determinist
side of events that have moved from the virtual to the actual, but we
are always in fact between the virtual and the actual, the determined
and the undetermined. We are like the player who, just having gone
down 3–2, suggests: ‘best of seven?’ Our situation, and the situation
outlined by Stanley Fish, with respect to the chain-novel of history,
resembles the ‘problem of points’ investigated by Pascal and Fermat,
in the correspondence which inaugurated modern probability cal-
culus – that is, the problem of assessing the likely outcome of a game
which one is in the middle of playing.19 What Pascal and Fermat
could not take into account was that their way of estimating the just
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outcome of the game might in fact be part of the game.

So is it ever game over for the past? No, because the relations
which we convince ourselves constituted a text were only ever a par-
tial actualization of its possibility, which it may be left for us or others,
depending perhaps largely on our calculation of the likely profit or
utility, to attempt to complete. It will remain true for ever and a day
that on Thursday, 16 June 1904, Throwaway won the Ascot Gold Cup
by a length from the 5–4 on favourite Zinfandel, at odds of 20–1. No
matter how many times the race might be replayed, Zinfandel will
never make up that length to alter the outcome of the race. But the
significance of that fact currently seems to have a better-than-average
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chance of continuing to radiate and unfold. Why? Because, lucky as

Throwaway and his backers might have thought themselves, they got
luckier than every other horse, and every other race that day, because
this race was picked out by James Joyce for special attention in his
novel Ulysses, and, presumably, by using something of the process
that punters themselves might have used, namely, scanning the
papers and looking for some circumstance in the name of the horse
that seemed to pick it out from the rest and promote it to attention
– something, in other words, that reduced its randomness and
increased its redundancy.
Throwaway survives because Joyce won his bet, meaning that it
was able to become multiple, entering into a relation that will ensure
continued replication (though only and exactly for as long as it does).
This is to say, it continues in being by entering into a field of prob-
abilities, which could not reasonably have been thought to be a likely
part of its original field of opportunity. Things survive, seeming to
exhibit in the very fact of their survival a will to persistence, because
they are repeatedly selected, because there is a high chance of their
seeming significant.
This is not to say that the past is endlessly revisable or retractable.
This view does not require anything like an alternative universes
theory, which would allow us somehow to throw the dice again and
get a different outcome. There are facts, but those facts can be made
meaningful in many different ways. An historical fact is like a move
in a game that is still in process. Because the game is not over until
the fat lady sings, and there is rarely any sign of the approach of the
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taxi bearing this consummating personage, the significance of any

particular throw is not yet completely settled. A statement about the
past is always hazardous, to the degree that it is a prediction about
its future. A fact is only an event with a high probability, so far, of
being replicated without modification, in changing circumstances.
I have been trying to show in this chapter that it is unhelpful to
think of chance as outside or beyond determination. I have also sug-
gested that this makes for a complex interlacing of before and after,
anticipation and retrospection, in history, which articulates time, in
both its senses, dividing and connecting it. Number does not govern
or completely account for this process, but provides a subtle and
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sensitive form of access to it. The kinds of quantitative method which

are beginning to become available, as digitization and new methods
of data analysis provide us both with more forms of evidence and
ways of investigating it, can only help us to develop more fine-
grained and verifiable accounts of fields of meaning and the conflict
and circulation of concepts as a result.
But chance is different from all the other kinds of otherness, or
has now historically (that is, by chance) become so. For centuries,
chance has represented the incalculable as such, absolute, unknow-
able and intractable. This left the sphere of causality, determination
and the calculation of consequences intact. If simply no account can
be taken of chance, then it can be set aside as the simply or absolutely
unknowable, meaning that, reduced as its sphere may be, one can
at least count upon what one can under no circumstances calculate.
What happens from the seventeenth century onwards is the entry
of chance into calculability itself. The advantage of this is clear, and
the vast importance of statistical reasoning in contemporary life
makes it obvious how impossible it would be to do without prob-
ability calculus. Many calculations actually depend upon random-
ness, hence the strange and paradoxical quest for reliable ways of
generating genuinely random numbers, in other words for a deter-
minate indetermination.20 The cost is the surrender of the possibility
of exactness, even as an ultimate horizon. Henceforth one works not
against error and inexactness, but with and within them. It is not
the incalculability of chance that is the problem, but the fact that it
is no longer possible to regard chance as wholly incalculable and
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remain honest.

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Keeping the B eat

In The Art of English Poesie, George Puttenham introduces a contrast

between strict metre and a more flowing kind of rhythm, the second
of which he characterizes with the term numerosity:

There is an accomptable number which we call arithmeticall

(arithmos) as one, two, three. There is also a musicall or aud-
ible number, fashioned by stirring of tunes & their sundry
times in the vtterance of our words, as when the voice goeth
high or low, or sharpe or flat, or swift or slow: & this is called
rithmos or numerositie, that is to say a certaine flowing vtter-
aunce by slipper words and sillables, such as the toung easily
utters, and the eare with pleasure receiueth, and which flow-
ing of words with much volubility smoothly proceeding
from the mouth is in some sort harmonicall and breedeth to
th’eare a great compassion.1
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Puttenham stresses that numerosity is a matter of gliding rather

than hopping – as we might now sometimes say, of continuous or
analogue movement characterized by ease, fluidity, smoothness and
volubility, rather than discontinuous or digital movements. But
numerosity makes it clear that this movement is not unnumerical, but
rather ‘numerous’ – numerous without being numberable. It is, he
says, rithmos, which is not exactly arithmetical, but, since inexactness,
a certain kind of uncertainty, is exactly what seems to be in play here,
it is not exactly not arithmetical either. Puttenham assumes that
arithmos means something like ‘without flow’, though there is in fact
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Rhythm derives from ῥεῖν, to flow, that is audible in words like rheostat,
no direct relationship between the words arithmetic and rhythm.

Puttenham wants to think, but derives more directly from ἀριθμός,

rheum and diarrhoea. But arithmetic is not a privative form of rithmos, as

arithmos, a number, itself deriving from the verb αἴρω, airo, meaning
to raise, lift or take up, so presumably involving an idea of the
reckoning up of number. There cannot be a pure rhythm, pure flow,
since there can only be flow across what breaks or retards it. Amps
equal volts divided by ohms. Without ohms, no amps: zero resist-
ance, no current. To go with the flow completely is to be static; the
foot must step into the river to feel the force of its current.
The word numerosity appears at irregular intervals in discussions
of prosody and versification over the next few centuries, often to
characterize the move from the unrhymed and accented verse of
Greek and Latin poets to the more formal metres and rhymed verse
of English poetry. In these discussions, numerosity usually means
subtly differentiated but harmonious flow. Oliver Goldsmith writes
that ‘cadence comprehends that poetical style which animates
every line, that propriety which gives strength and expression, that
numerosity which renders the verse smooth, flowing, and harmon-
ious.’2 Edward Wadham deploys the word to articulate the traditional
preference for the subtlety of Greek poetic rhythm in comparison
with the plonking regularity of rhyme and metre in English verse.
Wadham argues that ‘Music is as the vowel, rendered infinitely im-
pressionable by being entirely dissevered from the consonant,’ such
that, in a melodious passage like the beginning of the Odyssey, ‘the
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instances of half-rhyme, alliteration, and every variety of approach

to repetition of foregone sounds, are absolutely too multitudinous
to indicate; the whole verse is alive with their playing and combining,
like a sunset sky with irradiate tints.’3 Rhyme is a blocky contraction
of rhythm, a mechanical squashing together of what the melodious
rhythm of numerosity generously lengthens out:

Rhyme is too intense for melody; it is the caricature of it,

nothing more. Suppose it, say, the aggregation of melody
into one spot — but is melody a thing that can be aggre-
gated? Melody is rather numerosity, a blending murmur,
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than one full concordance. Melody is as effectually silenced

by rhyme as the tones of a flute under the beating of a drum.4

Numerousness could occasionally substitute for numerosity, for example

in Dryden’s praise of Horace in 1685: ‘That which will distinguish his
Style from all other Poets, is the Elegance of his Words, and the numerousness
of his Verse; there is nothing so delicately turn’d in all the Roman Language,’
though this is a rather unusual use of the term.5 In a 1762 essay on
Greek and Latin prosody, John Foster makes an explicit distinction
between ‘numerosity’ and ‘quantity’, in arguing that appreciating
the harmony of Latin verse requires that one pay attention to accent
as well as beat, or ‘tones’ as well as ‘times’: ‘Those, therefore, who,
in considering the numerosity of writings, attend to quantity alone,
regard only the inferior part of the subject before them.’6 A writer
on education in 1785 observed that, in proverbs, ‘the numerosity
of the sentence pleased the ear and the vivacity of the image dazzled
the fancy.’7
Not everybody thought of numerosity as subtlety. Thomas De
Laune heard in the rhythms of Greek and Latin verse an ‘idle or delicate
itch of Words, that external sweetness or allurement, that numerosity of sounds,
or those pleasing trifles’ that was not evident in the ‘Grave and Masculine
Eloquence’ of the sacred scriptures.8 And sometimes the word
‘numerosity’ was used in the opposite sense to that distinguished
by Puttenham. Thomas Sprat uses it to mean the close adherence to
regular metre in his discussion of Cowley:
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He understood exceeding well all the variety and power of

Poetical Numbers; and practis’d all sorts with great happi-
ness. If his Verses in some places seem not as soft and
flowing as some would have them, it was his choice not his
fault. He knew that in diverting mens minds, there should
be the same variety observ’d as in the prospects of their Eyes:
where a Rock, a Precipice, or a rising Wave, is often more
delightful than a smooth, even ground, or a calm Sea. Where
the matter required it, he was as gentle as any man. But
where higher Virtues were chiefly to be regarded, an exact
numerosity was not then his main care.9
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Thomas Morell borrows Sprat’s phrase to defend Chaucer’s

versification in his edition of The Canterbury Tales in 1737, remarking
that ‘an exact Numerosity . . . was not Chaucer’s main care . . . His
Numbers, however, are by no Means so rough and inharmonious as
some People imagine.’10
Despite these variations, numerosity seems to be used to name
something like the principle I have been calling quantality in this
book. It seems to evoke a counting that is not, in Puttenham’s term,
‘accomptable’, that cannot quite keep count of, nor yet quite account
for, itself. Nowadays, ‘numerosity’ has acquired the meaning among
psychologists and animal ethologists of the ‘number sense’ as it may
be displayed in humans and other species.11 I have not yet found
evidence of this usage much before the 1990s (and the oed does not
yet even register it).
Number is a kind of irritant within the history of thinking about
rhythm and metre in literary studies. There is a tension in this history
between the effort to account with complete and objective precision
for prosodic structures and effects, thereby reducing literary effects
wholly to a matter of number, and accounts that focus on the com-
plexity of the interinvolvement of objectivity and subjectivity in the
apprehension of rhythm. Simon Jarvis, who has called urgently and
sustainedly for prosody to be taken seriously as part of the distinctive
kind of cognition that poetry offers, has argued that the dream of
making prosody fully accountable, to itself or to anything else, is a
sort of myth or mania: ‘As well crack quantum mechanics upon the
Roman Rite as set linguistics to a total calculus of metrical types . . .
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prosody cannot be grounded on the model of the measurement of an

object.’12 Jarvis believes that one cannot simply and serially correct the
mistakes of past theorists of versification with a more precise scien-
tific method because ‘the “mistake” is this idea which the scientistic
prosodist has that his or her method is a fully demythologised one.’13
But, in his opposition to the dream of full scientific explicitness,
the verbal equivalent, perhaps, of accountability, Jarvis perhaps
attempts to keep number at bay in an absolute way that presents diffi-
culties. This is precisely because of the claims he wishes to push
through for the role of prosody in thinking and in the formation of
the subject. Jarvis quotes Henri Meschonnic to the effect that ‘There
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can be no theory of rhythm without a theory of the subject, and no

theory of the subject without a theory of rhythm,’14 and finds warrant
for this in Hegel’s description of rhyme as a figure for the coming
back of the subject to itself in time:

The subject is a self-exteriorization and a return, a recollec-

tion after an excursion, for which language furnishes the
most eminent model, but which is also seen, for example, in
the structure of human labour. Only this excursion and re-
turn can convert the merely indifferent flow of time into the
shaped and understood duration which makes subjectivity
intelligible.15

Jarvis concludes that ‘it can in a certain sense be said that the subject
rhymes, for Hegel.’16 This is a brilliant intuition. Jean-Luc Nancy has
argued for something like the same structure of resonance in the
formation of the subject through the reflexivity of rhythm:

We should linger here for a long while on rhythm: it is noth-

ing other than the stroke of time, the vibration of time itself
in the stroke of a present that prevents it by separating it
from itself, freeing it from its simple stanza to make it into
scansion (rise, raising of the foot that beats) and cadence
(fall, passage into the pause). Thus, rhythm separates the
succession of the linearity of the sequence or length of time:
it bends time to give it to time itself, and it is in this way that
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it folds and unfolds a ‘self.’17

Nancy offers us a resonant subject in place of a subject conceived as

a line of sight or point of view, which is

an intensive spacing of a rebound that does not end in any

return to self without immediately relaunching, as an echo,
a call to that same self. While the subject of the target is
always already given, posed in itself to its point of view,
the subject of listening is always still yet to come, spaced,
traversed, and called by itself, sounded by itself.18
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This is to make the self a particularly musical kind of counting

out or self-enumeration. The I becomes itself, is able to be at one with
itself, by dint of a self-division, by going out from and coming back
to itself. In this way, it follows a numerical logic we have met with
repeatedly in this book; it becomes one by becoming two, since it is
only by being the kind of thing that can be counted as one, that is that
could be counted twice, that the one becomes knowable to itself. I
have said it before: there must be at least two before there can be one.
A rhythmic self is a self that, at least in part, comes to itself
through this kind of counting, or self-enumeration. I think that
closer and more candid inspection will reveal that sound, self and
the sense of number are tightly articulated with each other. A much-
repeated remark of G. W. Leibniz may get us in the way of thinking
about this. In a letter of 17 April 1712 to Christian Goldbach, Leibniz
wrote that ‘Musica est exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis
se numerare animi.’19 Oliver Sacks offers a pleasingly rangy transla-
tion of this in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat: ‘The
pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting
unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.’20 This
chimes kindly on the ear, though the ‘nothing but’ is an extra quan-
tity and there is really nothing in what Leibniz says about pleasure,
even if one might reasonably assume that the exercitium arithmeticae,
the arithmetical exertion of the mind, might indeed be a source of
enjoyment. Rather more precise is the translation offered by E.F.J.
Payne in his English version of Book iii of Schopenhauer’s The World
as Will and Representation, in which he quotes Leibniz: ‘[Music is] an
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unconscious exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know

it is counting.’21 But it is still not unimpeachably precise. Occultum,
‘hidden’, may imply unconsciousness, but is in fact something dif-
ferent from nescientis. It may certainly be that the exercise is hidden
simply because the mind is unaware that it is exerting itself in this
way, but it might well be hidden in some other way.
Leibniz repeats these sentiments in his ‘Principles of Nature and
Grace’ of 1714:

What is more, even the pleasures of sense are reducible to

intellectual pleasures, known confusedly. Music charms us,
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although its beauty consists only in the agreement of

numbers and in the counting, which we do not perceive but
which the soul nevertheless continues to carry out, of the
beats or vibrations of sounding bodies which coincide at
certain intervals. The pleasures which the eye finds in pro-
portions are of the same nature, and those caused by other
senses amount to something similar, although we may not
be able to explain them so distinctly.22

If Leibniz is right and all music involves some kind of counting,

it would be worth our while to wonder if there were reciprocally
some music in all counting. It would seem at least to be the case that
there is always something auditory in counting, precisely because
counting is what enables us to stretch or exert ourselves beyond what
can be grasped by the native visual numerosity that enables us to
grasp and name small numbers. It is not possible to count items of
any kind without engaging in some kind of recitation, some sort of
counting out, where the ‘out’ is the extension or exteriority of time
rather than of space. And, extension being related as etymological
cousin to Greek tenein, to stretch, to tone and tune, this kind of tem-
poral extension may be thought of as a form of intonation. Leibniz
seems to be pointing to a kind of numerosity, a toning or entraining
of the mind, that numbers enact without explicit counting.
As we saw in Chapter Two, Sacks in fact sees this kind of inner
counting as part of what knits brain to body. Someone who has been
deprived of the use of a limb may find that it drops out of their body
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map, and must be actively reincorporated. In fact, ‘body map’ is

perhaps a bit of an approximation here, for it is not so much a picture
of the limb that is required, especially if it is a leg or foot that is
usually experienced in motion, so much as some kind of bodily
melody that must be remembered for the limb itself to become one-
self again a member of the orchestrated body. Melody seems better
than map, because what one must remember in walking is not some-
thing one has to grasp, or keep in mind, like a picture or diagram,
but something one has to know how to do without knowing quite
how one is doing it. Walking is like saying your times tables, playing
a scale or reciting a poem. Sacks describes how, following the
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climbing accident discussed above in Chapter Two and the forced

immobilization of a leg for a fortnight, he had forgotten the rhythm
of walking. The Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E Minor, which he
had been playing repeatedly in hospital, came to his aid:

Suddenly, as I was standing, the concerto started to play

itself with intense vividness in my mind. In this moment, the
natural rhythm and melody of walking came back to me, and
along with this, the feeling of my leg as alive, as part of me
once again. I suddenly ‘remembered’ how to walk.23

Not the least striking thing about Sacks’s account is the fact that
the leg is here brought to life, turned from a dead, merely mechanical
appendage into something incorporated, by means of something
itself inanimate or mechanical, the music which, by dint of the fact
that Sacks had been playing it over and over on the only cassette tape
he had with him, started ‘to play itself ’ in or through him. A little
later, Sacks describes a woman with a paralysed leg following a hip
fracture, whose leg could not move at all, except once when ‘it had
kept time at a Christmas concert, “by itself,” when an Irish jig was
being played’.24 The rhythm of music seems to induce motion, purely
and immediately through motion itself. Music seems to be an excel-
lent way of structuring and storing information sequentially. The
songs and melodies that most of us know, as well as information
embodied in rhymes, code for a kind of knowledge that we cannot
hold in our minds or access all at once, but must allow to play out
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diachronically in the mode of counting through: ‘Thirty days hath

September . . .’.
But this points to an interesting feature of counting, which may
complicate the contrast that Puttenham offers between rhythm and
arithmetic and the distinction offered by Leibniz between conscious
and unconscious counting. For counting cannot perhaps be said to
be something that we can ever do entirely consciously (even suppos-
ing we could attach some coherent meaning to the idea of being
entirely conscious). We are able to count only if we have learned
already how to count, that is, if we already have names for the
numerical values that occur in ordinal sequence, and know their
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sequence. I do not have to think much about counting, any more

than I have to think about reciting the alphabet, because they are
both autonomized routines. As I say ‘five’, ‘six’ seems already to be
welling up in it, and I cannot in any sensible way be said to ‘decide’
the matter of what number is to follow. The transition seems to hap-
pen in a sort of cinch or pocket of time, and these blinks of the mind
are what propel me along the automatic sequence of counting. So, if
it is true that we count things out in order to try to be more precise
or explicit about how many items they may consist of, it is also true
that there is something that is implicit, puckered or precoded in the
action of counting. I can only count because I do not have to account
fully for everything in the process of counting and so cannot be said
ever to be fully conscious of it, or fully and equally at hand at every
moment of it. Oliver Sacks, drawing on the work of many others,
points to the likelihood that humans ‘are the only primates with such
a tight coupling of motor and auditory systems in the brain – apes
do not dance, and though they sometimes drum, they do not antici-
pate a beat and synchronize to it in the same way that humans do’.25
This may imply that there is indeed a kind of ‘hidden exercise’ in-
volved in music, but that the exercise or putting of oneself into play
is not one of which one could be completely the pilot. Exertion is
from ex + serere, an unbinding, where serere means both to join, bind
or intertwine, whence series, and also to sow, strew or spread, whence
serum, semen and dissemination. When I count as I listen to music,
whether consciously or unconsciously, I make the music conform to
some external framework. But it really is beginning to seem as if
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there is a kind of music involved in counting itself, which partially

swallows me up. Counting is always, in some measure, dance, or
trance. The relation between dance and music, each one a kind of
register or index of the other, is itself one of reciprocal measure, as
when the Duke urges the couples joined at the end of As You Like It
‘With measure heap’d in joy, to th’measures fall.’26 There is always a
kind of falling in (cadence) incident to musical counting.
This becomes particularly apparent in the practice of ‘counting
in’, whether it be sounded out, or tacit, in the beats of the conduc-
tor’s baton. In this process, the count is set going, as an autonomous
mechanism. As the music begins, it blends into the introducing
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count, which blends into it. It is as though, taking up the count, the
music begins to count for itself, immanently.
Counting can sometimes seem to become fully autonomous,
giving itself its own law. In his account of his delusions during a
period of madness and incarceration, John Perceval describes a
counting routine that got out of hand in this way:

Weary at length, and unable to comprehend these com-

mands, I sought for sleep, and recollecting what my mother
had formerly told me of my father, that he used when he
found himself unable to obtain rest, to keep continually
counting to himself, I tried the same. But then the power of
thinking numbers for myself was taken from me, and my
mind or life lay in my body, like a being in a house unable to
do anything but listen to the sound of others talking around
him, and voices like the voices of females or fairies – very
beautiful – very small, and with a rapidity I cannot describe,
began counting in me, and entirely without my control. First,
one voice came and counted one, two, three, four, up to ten
or twenty – then a second voice took up the word twenty, and
kept repeating twenty – twenty – twenty – whilst another
after each twenty called one – two – three – four, and so on
till they came to thirty – then another voice took up the word
thirty, and continued crying thirty – thirty – thirty, whilst a
voice called out after each thirty – one – two – three – four,
and so on till they came to forty, and thus the voices within
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me proceeded, dividing the labour between them, and so

quickly, that I could not possibly pronounce the numbers.27

This sounds like a kind of literalization of an experience of one’s

thoughts racing away which is actually quite common, especially in
insomnia. But it also tilts us towards the little, lulling slumber that
lurks in every effort at ‘thinking numbers for myself ’, in Perceval’s
intriguing phrase. It is not clear whether there is suffering or joy in
this delusion. The counting eventually gets beyond Perceval’s powers
to follow it, so he is himself unable to keep count of the counting
that is going on inside him. Yet, perhaps partly because of this fact,
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he pronounces the sound ‘very beautiful’ and, if he thinks of

himself being subjected to or becoming assimilated to some kind
of machinery, that machinery is female.
Richard Feynman describes a rather more willed and systematic
series of experiments in internal counting. Prompted by reading an
article about variations in the time sense induced by the experience
of fever, Feynman established through repeated practice a kind of
internal metronome that meant he was able reliably to count up to
sixty, taking very close to 48 seconds every time. Having trained up
this internal counting module, Feynman started to experiment with
things that might disrupt it. He proved to be able to read out loud
perfectly competently while maintaining his internal count, though
he found it difficult to perform other counting operations, such as
running up and down stairs or counting items in his laundry, at the
same time:

when I put out the laundry, I had to fill out a form saying how
many shirts I had, how many pants, and so on. I found I
could write down ‘3’ in front of ‘pants’ or ‘4’ in front of
‘shirts,’ but I couldn’t count my socks. There were too many
of them: I’m already using my ‘counting machine’ – 36, 37,
38 – and here are all these socks in front of me – 39, 40, . . .
How do I count the socks?28

Feynman does not mention listening to or playing music while

counting, but the capacity of percussionists to maintain different
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rhythms simultaneously suggests that this might not have made for
insuperable difficulty. Listening to music seems to involve what
Puttenham calls a ‘compassion’, in which it is not quite clear how
action and passivity are distributed. When I count, I seem con-
sciously to be regulating something that would otherwise go beyond
my control. When my mother, who never drove or owned a car,
would stand helpless and infuriated at the kerb watching the cars
sweep by, she would channel her rage into counting them: ‘one,
two, three, four, five, six’, she would count out, six marking the
appalling limit of intolerability. Counting through to six allowed her
a triumphant declaration of the unspeakability of being made to wait
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that long. But at the same time, I give myself over in counting to
something that seems to be counting itself out through me. The
point about counting seems to be that it is never clear who or what
exactly is doing it. Why else would one count in order to go to sleep?
The ‘exercitium’ in Leibniz’s formula is conductive, passing from
the music to which I lend my ear, to me, and then back out again to
the music which seems to me to be inciting my exertion.
All this is a question of rhythm, a word which, like the word series,
conjoins measure and flow. There can be no rhythm without flow,
without the movement or exertion that carries one across from one
beat to another, yet equally there can be no flow without the beats or
divisions between which the flow occurs. There must be matter for
there to be metre; there must be the hard for there to be soft.

Spanking and Poetry

For this reason, there is also a certain measure of cruelty, the cruelty
of measure itself, in rhythm. The figure of the conductor has been a
late arrival in music, and, where there was a leader of an orchestra,
he might very well confine himself simply to beating time. Carroll’s
Mad Hatter’s tea party provides a silly but telling reminder of the
agonistics of time-keeping:

‘I dare say you never even spoke to Time!’

‘Perhaps not,’ Alice cautiously replied; ‘but I know I have
to beat time when I learn music.’
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‘Ah! That accounts for it,’ said the Hatter. ‘He wo’n’t stand
beating. Now, if you only kept on good terms with him, he’d
do almost anything you liked with the clock . . .’29

The most well-known story of the violence and fatality that lie
latent in the beating of time is that of the death of Jean-Baptiste Lully,
who is said to have accidentally struck his toe while beating time with
his staff during a performance of his admittedly strapping Te Deum.
The toe became infected, and, refusing offers to save his life by
amputating it, Lully died of gangrene.30 The history of conducting
involves a move from the hard to the soft, from conducting as driving
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(conduire is the French verb for ‘to drive a car’) to conducting as subtle
interchange of energy. The baton no longer strikes some surface
audibly: there is no object for it to come up against in the form of an
audible impact, or at least not after the imperious rap on the music
stand which is the only vestige of that uncouthness. Instead, there
is a nervous, quivering but infinitely powerful shaping without
touching in air, making out a mobile topology of feeling, a third
space between orchestra and conductor in which the music can be
figured, leading and led by it. In this space, positions and directions
are mingled and transformed, conducting becoming induction,
reduction, production, seduction.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has pointed to a similar interchange be-
tween the hardness of compulsion and the softness of wanting in her
essay ‘A Poem is Being Written’. This most earnest and formidably
authoritative of literary critics begins her essay with the bold and
altogether breathtaking announcement that ‘When I was a little child
the two most rhythmic things that happened to me were spanking
and poetry.’31 The episodes of family spanking, and the memories that
recall them, constitute a ‘breath-holding space’ (Tendencies, 182), in
which control and release are held in tension, and the rawly shameful
excitement of exhibition coexists with sonorous and tactile rhythm:

A primal hunger to be seen was certainly not undone in these

punitive moments, but only made inseparable from the
paralysis of my own rage and the potency and bland denial
of my parents’ rage; from the tensely not uncontrolled,
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repressed and repressive (and yet how speaking) rhythm of

blows, or beats; from the tableau itself. (Tendencies, 182–3)

There is a rhyme, amounting almost to magical identity, between

the scene of spanking and the similarly apnoeic poisedness of the
lyric poem, a containment which is a space, but also a stretch,
marked out by beating or pulsing, in which percussion and pulsation
may take place:

The lyric poem, known to the child as such by its beat and
by a principle of severe economy (the exactitude with which
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the frame held the figure) – the lyric poem was both the
spanked body, my own body or another one like it for me to
watch or punish, and at the same time the very spanking, the
rhythmic hand whether hard or subtle of authority itself.
(Tendencies, 184)

This beating is an alternation of scene and sound, the iambic thud

of the rhythm programming a rhyme between the alternation of
sound and silence and the alternation between movement and stasis,
even extending to the segmenting of the child’s stripped body: ‘The
glamorized, inbreathing theatrical space of the spanking thus con-
tracted to the framing of a single, striped, and sectioned midbody
that wanted to move and mustn’t’ (Tendencies, 183).
The essay, which intersperses extracts from poetry read and
written at different stages of Sedgwick’s life with reflections on
spanking and the pornographic imagination (candidly her own),
even proposes a link between chastisement and the poetic technique,
which she discovered early on, of enjambment.

I knew enjambment, not just for a technical word in the intro-

duction to my rhyming dictionary, but for a physical gesture
of the limbs, of the flanks, the ham. I thought then, too – in
fact I thought it until I checked my dictionary just today –
that a doorjamb, for instance, was the thing one wedged in
the door to keep it open, a doorstop. From all this I visual-
ized enjambment very clearly as not only (what my French
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dictionary now tells me) the poetic gesture of straddling lines

together syntactically, but also a pushing apart of lines. In
terms of the beat(ing) of the poem, enjambment was, in this
fantasy that shaped my poetic, the thrusting up out of the
picture plane in protest by the poem’s body of a syntactic
thigh or shank that would intercept, would retard the num-
bered blow: would momentarily wedge apart with sense the
hammering iteration of rhythm. (Tendencies, 185–6)

Enjambment is a wedging or delaying – the leg raised to inter-

cept the blow – and also a crossing or straddling. Like the two-stroke
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lub–dub of iambic poetry, or, come to that, of spanking, it both

arrests and accelerates, in a stutter of fluidity. Like poetry, ballet is ‘a
rhythmic, prestigious, exhibitionistic and highly theatricalized way
of choosing the compelled and displayed body’ (Tendencies, 186). And
Sedgwick insists that the allure of this spectacle was the compound-
ing in it of pained passivity and impassioned choice, discovering for
herself, as many children subject to violence from which they cannot
escape may discover, how ‘to abstract the body of one’s own humili-
ation; or perhaps most wonderfully, to identify with it’, so that ‘the
compelled body could be chosen’ (Tendencies, 184). Under these circum-
stances, or at least in their recollection, it is the suffering child who
is ‘ravenous for dominion’, a dominion (but whose?) to which the
writing of poetry gives her (Tendencies, 184). And the recollection here,
as Sedgwick slyly hints, is in any case the excuse or occasion for
fantasy: the intensity with which it is remembered seeming to be in
proportion to the unlikelihood of its ever having taken place.
Yet it is disappointing and indeed a little perplexing that ‘A Poem
is Being Written’, which seems to insist so much on the importance
of rhythm, is almost totally anacoustic. If there is a kind of rhythm in
the complex disposition of its elements, it is the abstract rhythm
of an avant-garde silent film. The writing, as clogged and clotted
with qualification, anticipation and flashback as the Jamesian prose
about which Sedgwick elsewhere wrote so intently, forms ‘a tempor-
ality miraculously compressed by the elegancies of language’
(Tendencies, 184). Not even the discussion of female anal eroticism
into which the essay opens out can loosen the stiffly compacted mass
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of the writing. Perhaps with some residual primness or effort to

maintain propriety in the self-disclosure, the thickened white noise
of its writing-on-the-spot holds the text back from giving itself over
to the rawly masturbatory rhythm to which it elaborately alludes.
Perhaps Sedgwick’s resistance to giving way, or play, to the actual
rhythm which she indirectly evokes in her text is a way of framing
the erotic impulse, a framing that simultaneously allows and dis-
allows it – making it possible for the academic to talk dirty, as I am
doing now in hands-clean pleasurable proxy, by making the talking
the subject of the discourse. Is the device of talking the real English
vice, perhaps?
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Sedgwick’s visualism may in part transmit the influence of

‘A Child is Being Beaten’, the Freud essay on which ‘A Poem is Being
Written’ is a variation, for Freud’s essay also focuses entirely on the
complex theatricality of sadomasochism. The girl conducting
the fantasy (Freud focuses attention mostly on female fantasies, and
indeed the essay is strongly focused around his own daughter Anna,
whose sadomasochistic fantasies he analysed, and who subsequently
picked up the beat in her own essay on sadomasochism) is in several
places, and indeed persons, at once: ‘A child is being beaten’; ‘My
father is beating the child’, ‘I am being beaten by my father’; ‘I am probably
looking on’.32
But though neither Freud (neither of the Freuds) nor Sedgwick
pays much attention to the erotic acoustics of sadomasochistic
fantasy, they might very well have. The particular play of passivity
and dominion that is bound up in the experience of sound is dis-
cussed by William Niederland.33 More specifically, the ritual of
counting strokes, or, frequently, forcing the victim to count out the
strokes, is a recurrent part of the sadomasochistic repertoire. Count-
ing is part of the ordeal, from German Urteil, the base of Old English
adǣlan, to divide or separate, the doling out of dolour in exact and
unalterable amounts. In talionic logic, exactness always participates
in the pitiless hardness of exaction. Such a counting rhythm trad-
itionally mechanizes the discourse of the punisher too: ‘you-will-
nev-er-do-that-a-gain’. And yet counting, in which the victim is often
required to participate, also provides a scansion, which controls,
contains and orientates what would otherwise be simple inundation
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by suffering. Counting can mark an agony of exposure to formless

and empty time, which consists blindly and indifferently of one thing
after another, each moment a new agony, exactly the same, yet even
buildingly more unbearable for that; yet it also provides the capacity
for time to be enrhythmed, its indifference given an apprehensible
shape and cadence by the strokes, a word that belongs both to beating
and timekeeping: ‘one, two, three, four, five, six’.
In all discourse about the relation between regular structure and
irregular or unaccountable event, there is an implicit rivalry between
the living and the dead. To force someone to count out the numbers
of the strokes that are inflicted on them is to force them into the dead
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condition of a mere number, to force unpredictable life into the

painfully regular form of a tattoo, a shape beaten out in air that
hardens into visible image incised in the flesh. Such questions of life
and death are prominent in the claims made by Simon Jarvis for the
cognitive force of poetic music. In his discussion of the melodics of
the long poem, Jarvis focuses on the force of the line, which he
represents as the primary unit within the design of the long poem:

The metrical line is the compositional cell of the long poem,

before it becomes ‘the long poem’; the possibility of recom-
position-in-performance, essential to all long poems before
they are corralled first into orally standardized and quasi-
identically recapitulated, then into written, and finally into
printed texts, depends for its possibility upon the formula, a
unit which is at once metrical and syntactic and semantic.
When all these songs have dried into print, the formula,
living repetition as the ever-exploding, ever-generating cell,
looks instead like a calque: now sounds, not like the seminal
word and tune it is, but like something insufficiently worked
over, a dead spot.34

A merely formulaic poem is one that has dried into ‘rational but
helpless quantification’.35 Jarvis finds in William Collins’s ‘The
Passions: An Ode for Music’ an example of a long poem that resists
this desiccation into mere number, characterizing the poem as ‘a war
to the life, in which line must show itself the equal of design, if the
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whole body is not to become sclerotic’.36 But the battle between the
nervous life of the line and the parched death of the design can only
be represented as a war between quantity and quality if one pulls
back far enough for the jags and spikes of numeration to be
smoothed out into living curves. Turn up the resolution, and the
difference between quantity and quality looks like a difference
between greater and lesser variation, with the ‘compositional cell’ as
the indispensable unit of quantification:

the individual line is coloured with the most delicate, the

subtlest, instrumentations, not alone with chiasmic
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ornaments of vocalic and consonantal material, but also

with interior rhythmic patternings. Now there will be a per-
fectly antithetical poise between two halves of a line, in
which the same tune rings out in both; now the line will
bunch all its emphases together in the middle or at the end
of the line; now a whole series of lines will run two metres
against each other simultaneously, so that a whole passage
can be construed either as tens or as sixes; so that the same
passage is, as it were, at once epic and lyric.37

Try as he might, Jarvis cannot really get number, quantity and

measure to stay on the side of death against life. If there is indeed a
war to the life against number, it is also fought through and with
number.
To bring time under tension – a word that links exertion and
music – is to coordinate the ordinal and the cardinal, to fold together
counting out and counting up. As one listens to music, one listens
out for, or listens in on, the count that one is keeping oneself.
Leibniz’s unconscious counting involves both recognition of pattern,
and conditional projections of those patterns into the open future of
what is being listened to. Perhaps all of this is just to characterize
the subjunctive mood in which all listening is conducted. The ear is
always conducting what it is conducted by, leading what is leading
it. This is as true of an utterance as it is of a melody, for every utter-
ance has its distinguishing prosodic profile. Understanding a
language or dialect is a matter very largely of tuning into these
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profiles, learning their landscapes of likelihood, becoming used to

keeping time with them.
Just as the human eye looks by default for a face amid a random
distribution of visual information, so the ear listens for a voice amid
formless noise. What one means by a voice is a particular kind of
redundancy, a set of ligatures of the sound that binds it into resonant
self-similarity. In this sense, we may say that a voice is simply the
personification (per-sona = ‘through sound’) of a rhythm. If a rhythm
is the articulation of a flow in recurring patterns, a fracture that is it-
self refracted back into iteration, then it is number that must register
this flexure, since only number allows for this particular kind of
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segmentation and reordering, this decomposition permitting

recomposition. Voice and melody are both probability distributions,
precipitates of a calculus.
The world is always between being and number. This is one of
the reasons why it is hard to accept formulations like Alain Badiou’s
regarding the ontology of number as such, let alone his more extrav-
agant claim that number may be Being itself. It does not even seem
right to say with Galileo that everything is written in the language of
number. We should rather say that nature everywhere tends towards
or converges upon number. The Pythagoreans were rattled by the
possibility that there could be irrational numbers in nature, but it is
in fact whole numbers that are elusive and anomalous. Everywhere
there are approximations, distributions, fluctuations around values.
Everywhere the real suggests the approach to the rational, but
nowhere are the real and the rational absolutely equivalent.
Counting, calculation, and music, the name we give to the
pleasure of living out the first two in the listening body, occupy this
gap. Michel Serres alludes to Leibniz’s remark about the uncon-
scious counting of music in the course of his own evocation of the
omnipresence of music in the universe:

Corporal and formal music, in which, uttering a sort of

mute word, the body counts without knowing the numbers.
In science, the mind knows that it is counting, it gives the
numbers names; music counts by means of unnamed num-
bers. Inundated by noise, we would be unable without music
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to enumerate this innumerability.38

It is for this reason that music is the intersection for Serres between
what he calls the hard – teeming, chaotic, churning materiality – and
the soft – form, intelligence, information. Music passes, and itself
permits the passage, between the numerous-innumerable and the
enumerated.
It is perhaps in this sense that Serres’s musical metaphysics con-
strues music as immanent in nature, and lying between form (hard)
and number (soft), music as sounded event and music as summable
form. But despite appearances, his view is not Pythagorean, for it
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does not see number as underlying or regulating the universe. Rather

nature moves towards number, which arises from it, as a coin being
tossed moves towards an absolute 50–50 ratio of heads to tails, with-
out ever settling into absolute invariance. The act of listening to
music or, what may come to the same thing, the act of listening
musically, occupies a similar space of number in the making,
between reality and ratio, arithmetic and rhythm. Music occurs
between the natura naturans and the natura naturata, nature counting
out and nature making a reckoning. Music is image and enactment
of the oscillating passage between the two.
When I listen to music, what do I hear? Well, I hear ‘the music’
to be sure, though perhaps I never hear all of the music, and not
being able to get my ears round all of it may be part of what that
listening involves. Listening is a counting that is not able to take
account of everything. But the fact that I must bring myself into a
condition of intonation in order to listen means that I listen to some-
thing more. Music is a making manifest of listening itself, a listening
made musical by lending an ear to itself. Music is the imaginary mat-
ter of this listening. What is manifested is what is ordinarily occult
in listening, but it is manifested not as a making conscious or as a
making explicit, but as a realizing or making actual. Or, it is a
making apparent of how much is not apparent to me of how I
make myself up as I go along. This kind of listening is not exactly
an exercitium arithmeticae occultum, an unconscious arithmetical action,
or it is not only this. It is an arithmetizing, a making arithmetical, of
unconscious action, a realizing of thinking and auditory awareness
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as a form of quantality. The numerosity of music as a production or

‘existing’ of consciousness as countable means that listening is not
just one mode of consciousness among others, consciousness sim-
ply setting itself to the work of listening; it is a way for consciousness
to give itself to itself as listening. The Russian philosopher of music
A. F. Losev sees music as ‘the expression of the life of numbers, a
“numeric matter,” a meonic–hyletic element that rages inside nu-
meric constructions’.39 To call this numeric matter ‘meonic–hyletic’

from τό μὴ ὄν, that which is not, and something, hyletic from ὕλη,
is to say that it exists between the condition of being nothing, meonic

primal matter (literally, in fact, wood). For Simon Jarvis, music is

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bound up in the process of binding up the experience of duration, as

the actualizing of a sequence of nothings made into a something,
into some continuous thing:

Emphasis cannot but claim that our experience of duration

is real. When hours, minutes and seconds drain away in
front of us as this sequence of nothings universalized into
the measure of life, then outworn iambs, trochees and
dactyls carry the promise of a real duration, and, with it, the
almost unimaginable promise that our experience might
also be for real.40

What kind of thing is a listening consciousness? It is conscious-

ness as a mode of self-collecting, in the way, perhaps, in which one
is said to ‘collect one’s thoughts’. Collecting in this manner is
founded upon the movement from one to two, as it is described by
Fred Kersten:

The form ‘Pair,’ or ‘the form ‘Plurality,’ is actualized (or con-

ferred) by virtue of an active collecting (specifically, an active
counting or colligating). In the presentation of a pair, we
discriminate not only the perceiving, grasping and objecti-
vating ‘This’ and ‘That,’ each as self-identical and numeri-
cally distinct from one another, but we also can discriminate
the active grasping of ‘This’ and then going on to actively
grasp ‘That,’ still holding ‘This’ in grip, but still keeping
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‘This’ and ‘That’ separate. Indeed, the constituting of a pair

proves to be the foundation for collecting and counting.41

Collecting, like counting, means adding items one by one (they

have to be items, or functionally identical units) to a loose, mobile,
quasi-totality, without having to hold the whole of the growing sum
and all its constituent elements. In counting, letting go is continuous
with hanging on, because the number series continues to contain
what is at each moment left behind or gone beyond. One need not
be or remain conscious of everything one experiences, or experiences
of oneself, precisely because one has the relation to oneself of being
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able to count through. Number, and perhaps only something like

number, allows for this kind of coherence-in-dehiscence, this ‘nu-
meric matter’. Alluding to Schopenhauer’s grandiose rewriting of
Leibniz’s ‘Musica est exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis
se numerare animi’ as ‘Musica est exercitium metaphysices occultum
nescientis se philosophari animi’ – ‘Music is an unconscious exercise
in metaphysics in which the mind does not know it is philosophizing’
– Kersten proposes the further modulation ‘Consciousness is a
hidden activity which does not know that it is an activity.’42
Music is associated with animation, while number is conven-
tionally on the side of death, the mechanical or the inert. But number
commutes between the organic and the inorganic, and cannot be
conclusively assigned to either. The sheer indifference of number
comes from the fact that all numbers are equivalent, or equatable, in
that they are made up of units that are exactly the same. Number
therefore represents the possibility of a world of absolute indiffer-
ence. The kind of unconscious counting that is at work in music, that
is the work of music, is the effort to capture and neutralize this in-
difference. But this is in the service of a life that must thereby depend
upon and pass through that deathly admixture of indifference that
number is.
This may account for some of the pleasure of listening. Listening
gives our listening to itself in a way that seems to externalize or au-
tomatize it, relieving us of the need to keep hold of ourselves. We do
not need to keep the count as long as music is doing the counting,
and that counting forms a numeric matter that lets us hear ourselves.
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It is the pleasure, when it is, of a work that just ‘works’, a work that
does all the work for itself.

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T he Numer at e Ey e

De Flores, in Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling, urges himself

on in his lustful pursuit of his lady, Beatrice, with the reflection that
she has probably already been unfaithful to her husband:

for if a woman
Fly from one point, from him she makes a husband,
She spreads and mounts then like arithmetic,
One, ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand,
Proves in time sutler to an army royal.1

Adding is what you do with arithmetic; it is one of the things that

arithmetic does. But, in De Flores’s imagination, arithmetic itself
keeps on adding to itself, since there is ever more arithmetic, which
never adds up to anything more precise than ‘an army’, which is not
so much a total as an item that remains to be added up. The addition
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that arithmetic performs leads to a sum, which is actually a reduction,

this the entire mystery of mathematics. The adding of arithmetical
operations themselves is an open accumulation, which simply
‘spreads and mounts’. There is something lubricious about this very
fact of mounting up, that truly lets copulation thrive. De Flores’s
image prompts us to see two things at once: Beatrice herself, spread-
ing for and mounting her lovers, and the look of the running sum of
her past and potential mates as it spills and sprawls across the page.
These are the two dimensions of number that have governed this
book – the number that has mathematical significance, that per-
forms operations and carries information, and the number that
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Arithmetica instructing an abacist at a medieval abacus and

an algorist at a counting board, woodcut from Grigor Reisch,
Margarita philosophica (1535).

exists as pure quantity (and therefore as a kind of quality), number

in numbers. There are other appearances suggesting the puzzlement
of arithmetic in seventeenth-century drama: Hamlet says of Laertes
‘I know to divide him inventorially would dazzle th’arithmetic of
memory.’2 Thersites says of Ajax, stalking up and down, that he
‘ruminates like an hostess that hath no arithmetic but her brain to
set down her reckoning’.3 One needs the support of visible space,
whether in the form of paper, slate, abacus or screen, to perform
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arithmetical operations. But if visible space is needed to shape and

stabilize reckonings, the very look of numbers and figurings-out can
dizzy the eye, as it becomes pure, unreckonable, spreading quantity,
accumulating mere numbers of numbers. As Katherine Hunt has
observed, the proliferation of handbooks and ready reckoners of all
kinds during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced
‘numbers in bulk’ and ‘masses of numbers’ that were both unread-
able and meant to remain largely unread, since they were designed
to furnish answers to particular mathematical problems.4 Number
can be limited by space; but numbers can also haemorrhage through
and decompose space. The space of number can provide both
orientation and disorientation. This chapter will consider how the
visual aspect of numbers operates on both sides of this division.
Numbers are things we say, but they are also, and much more
essentially and variously, things we see. There are two ways in which
we may be said to see numbers. First of all, we see the symbols of
numbers, since numbers are graphical forms, with specific shapes.
Numerals are the letters in which mathematics is written. And basic
numerical operations require to be performed in visible space. Skills
of calculation involve being able to see numerical relationships in a
sort of interior space that supplies the space of the piece of paper to
which most of us have to have recourse. If children learn to say
numbers before they learn to see them, that is probably in large part
because their apprehension of number comes through language,
and so must pass through the oral into the visual. But numbers seem
much more tied to graphical form than words. If there is a language
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of mathematics, it is to be regarded as primarily a written language.

But there is another sense in which we may be said to see num-
bers. Most people have to some degree the power of what in 1949
was first called ‘subitizing’, by which is meant recognizing numbers
of items without needing to count them.5 Typically, most humans
are able to do this easily with groups of two or three, and less easily,
but still with a fair degree of accuracy, with four, five and six. There-
after, the process of number recognition may be faster than counting,
but not by as much. Though we remain quite good at estimating dif-
ferences between larger groups of items, this kind of numeration is
relative rather than absolute enumeration: we may just have a feeling
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that one tree has more apples on its branches than another without
having much idea of what the total number might be. Unsurprisingly,
perhaps, humans share quite a lot of their subitizing capacities with
animals.6
We may suggest that number and spatial awareness are bound
together by more than coincidence. Any kind of manipulation of
number, beyond simple operations of merely counting through,
seems to require the sense of some space in which the manipulation
can take place. One of the huge advantages that came with the arrival
in Europe of the zero symbol was that, because it was really just a
number-sized chunk of blank space, it allowed calculations to be
made directly on as well as in space. The lack of regular consonance
between the size of quantities in Roman numerals and the numbers
used to represent them made working on and with the numerals
directly, as one can work with the beads on an abacus, very difficult.
Nevertheless, as Karl Menninger shows, the use of counting boards,
reckoning tables and abaci had acquainted human beings with the
principle of place-value long before the arrival into Europe of the
Indian place-value system in mathematics.7 As the name of the place-
value system announces clearly, it makes value dependent on an
item’s place in a system. This is the principle that makes difference
dependent on a kind of infinite in-difference, since it is impossible
to restrict the number of ways in which a number may be defined
relative to other numbers – even though this is the only way in which
a number can be defined. In articulating the principles of structural
linguistics at the beginning of the twentieth century, Ferdinand de
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Saussure saw that linguistic meaning was dependent on just this

kind of place-dependency.
Katherine Hunt and Rebecca Tomlin chart the process by which,
during the sixteenth century, ‘numbers moved from the counter table
to the page, from the material object to the written symbol.’8 But that
symbol never completely dematerialized, for these symbols were still
used for doing as well as showing. Double-entry bookkeeping made
the book itself into a sort of abacus or calculative apparatus. Rebecca
Tomlin has shown how the standing of arithmetic and mercantile
accounting was affirmed through the iconography of the books that
taught them, like James Peele’s The maner and fourme how to kepe a
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perfecte reconying (1553).9 The arithmetical manuals that began to

appear during the sixteenth century, devoted largely to providing
instruction in the Hindu–Arab place-value system of calculation, in-
vented a new kind of composite space, that was both an inert frame-
work within which calculations might be made, and a dynamic space,
summoned up and scooped out by the act of calculation. In the case
of texts like Robert Recorde’s Ground of Artes, which was written in
the form of a dialogue between master and scholar, the page also
becomes the mise-en-scène for the arithmetical lesson itself:

Rather than merely illustrating calculation procedures imag-

ined as taking place elsewhere, such figures come, at differ-
ent times, to stand in for the fictional space of the staged
‘lesson’; for the fictional writing-surface being marked in the
course of that lesson; for the thought-space of the Scoler’s
calculations; for the concrete objects (including sheep and
beasts) being quantified; and, in the end, for a hybrid
amalgam of all of these that becomes the natural habitat of
arithmetical operation itself.10

The sense of number requires us to conceive space as divisible

into equally sized units. Though we divide time in analogous ways,
we in fact always require spatial analogues for these divisions, the
time taken for a certain quantity of sand to move through an hour-
glass, say, or the clock hand to move a certain distance, or the tran-
sition between two energy levels of the caesium-133 atom. Number
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requires the sense of items, of identical chunks of things that may

be regarded as numerically identical, or will count as equivalently
‘one’ of whatever class of thing they are.
The apprehension of space also seems to require some appre-
hension of relative quantity. Descartes formalized the perception of
space with a grid that allowed for any point in visible space to be
represented numerically as the triangulation of three coordinates,
corresponding to the three dimensions of height, width and depth.
This suggested that there is a kind of internalized awareness not only
that space must be understood as divisible into quantities, but that
it must implicitly be understood as divisible only in a specific number,
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three, of directions. The very word dimension embodies the implicit

numbering of space, for it derives from dimetiri, to measure out, from
dis- out, away, asunder, and metiri, to measure. Though we may say
that we take a measurement in some one dimension, the word
embodies some kind of implicit awareness that we are thereby
moving away from another dimension, that is, that we are following
or creating a bifurcation in space.
These two capacities, one of them applied to numbers of things
in visible space, the other to symbols for numbers, and also numbers
of symbols, insofar as it may allow us quickly to see that there are
three groups of four objects, may often cooperate. Francis Galton
investigated the different ways in which individuals visualized
numbers and the number line.11 He reported that about one in thirty
males and about one in fifteen females experienced the ‘sudden and
automatic appearance of a vivid and invariable “Form” in the mental
field of view, whenever a numeral is thought of, and in which each
numeral has its own definite place’.12 The Form usually consisted of
a spatial schema or array in which numbers were grouped relative to
each other, in lines, rows or zigzags. Galton provided illustrations
of these Forms along with personal commentaries by their owners.
Subsequent experiments have demonstrated other links between
numbers and visual space, such as left-right asymmetry; in cultures
who write from left to right, larger numbers are associated with the
right hand, and smaller numbers with the left.13 We might under-
stand this as a certain gravitational pull of the spatial in the thinking
of number; numbers arise in and from quantities and magnitudes,
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and are then abstracted from them. The word ‘billion’ does not take
any longer to write or say than the word ‘million’, and 1,000,000
occupies only slightly more visible space than 1,000, despite signi-
fying a quantity 1,000 times larger. And yet the human propensity to
imagine numbers as concrete objects, occupying and distributed
through visible space, or indeed themselves forming it, keeps on
returning numbers to space.
Indeed, perhaps we may say that, not only are numbers always
implicitly spatializable, but visible space is implicitly numerical. Gal-
ton was interested not only in the visual dimensions of number, but
also in the reverse, the quantification of visual experience. Surprised
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to find that scientific men of his acquaintance seemed to have very

weak powers of mental visualization, he developed a numerical
scale to measure the intensity of this faculty and its distribution in
society.14 Galton’s two impulses, to number appearance and to
visualize number, are combined in the beautiful device he invented
to demonstrate how the normal or bell-curve distribution, one of the
most familiar and imperious nineteenth-century statistical icons (for
once the word is literally correct), comes about in practice. The
device, variously known as the quincunx, Galton box or bean-
machine, dropped metal beads down a board into which pins had
been driven pinball-fashion at regular intervals. The majority of the
balls were deflected an equal number of times to left or right, mean-
ing that they filtered through to form a fat hump in the middle of the
bottom row; much smaller numbers were deflected consistently to
the left or right, meaning that they ended up forming the narrow
brim of the bell curve to the extreme right or left.15
Our own visual culture is energetically making this latently
numerical condition ever more manifest. We may understand the
implications of this by considering what it means to think of a sound
spatially. This will always involve taking what is compounded (and
all sounds are compound, for there can be no sound of anything in
itself ) and decomposing it in such a way that its elements may be
thought of as being set apart or distributed in space as separable
elements. Where sound aggregates, vision creates adjacencies.
Vision depends always upon a primary act of division, in which in-
dividual objects are picked out from their backgrounds. I cannot see
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the duck and the rabbit simultaneously: I can only oscillate between
them. For the same reason, I can never see the whole of a painting,
or of any composite object, except by counting it as a kind of one,
which is abstracted from its background. One can easily point to
similar processes in auditory perception, but insofar as one can,
one is pointing to the visual components at work in it. Spatializing
or visualizing a sound means turning a chord into something like
a score.
It is possible to make a distinction between what may be called
mathematical and numerical functions in art. Mathematical art may
be characterized as art that is governed by certain mathematical
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An example of Sir Francis Galton’s quincunx, or bean-machine.

principles that may be structural or generative. Art, it is believed, is

both governed by and the gateway to certain recurring ‘laws’ or
essential forms, whether these are Platonic solids, the Golden
Section or the Fibonacci sequence. Such principles have often
provided artists with the occult or cultic authority they crave, after
the dwindling of other social or religious guarantees of the worth of
art or the standing of the artist. The scorn reserved for ‘painting by
numbers’, the popular practice of the 1950s that has become a phrase
that describes mechanically prefabricated kitsch, should not disguise
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Jasper Johns, White Numbers, 1957.

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Jasper Johns, Numbers in Color, 1958–9.

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the fact that it shares a certain structural principle with mathem-

atically construed art and design. Indeed both Leonardo and
Michelangelo assigned sections of their paintings to assistants on a
numbering principle.16
Whereas mathematical art, in the work of artists and writers like
Khlebnikov, Duchamp, Malevich, Mondrian, Man Ray and the many
others reviewed in Robert Tubbs’s Mathematics in Twentieth-century
Literature and Art (2014), derives its form from mathematical prin-
ciples, often claiming in the process to provide access to the secrets
of natural Form as such, what may be called numerical art operates
with numbers as its raw material.17 Mathematical art tends towards
reduction, since it demonstrates the power of a small number of
organizing forms or principles; numerical art tends towards expan-
sion, since in it, numbers are plural. In that it tends towards Platonic
forms, mathematical art is numinous, rather than numerous.
Numerical art is concerned with the visual form of numbers, not
their mathematical force (though there may sometimes, and perhaps
usually, be a certain play between the two kinds of idea). What
matters here is not primarily the signification of the numbers, except
insofar as they may signify the elementary forms of numericity, the
simple fact of being numbers.
The visual forms of numbers have been employed as ways of
importing immediate and unfalsified bits of reality into otherwise ab-
stract painting, for example in the collages of Braque and Schwitters.
Probably, though, no painter has made such frequent and systematic
use of number-forms as Jasper Johns. Johns first began painting
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numbers in the late 1950s, during a period in which he had been

painting a series of ordinary objects, such as flags, maps, targets and
letters. The choice of such objects, along with Johns’s habit of paint-
ing them repeatedly, has been understood as motivated by a desire
to ‘drain subjectivity from subject matter’, muting the expressive
drama that could attach to abstract painting. In fact, of all the com-
monplace visual forms that feature in Johns’s work, numbers are by
some way the most numerous.18 He has returned to them throughout
his career, producing around 180 works in different media from
1955 onwards, including, in recent years, sculptures cast in bronze
and silver.
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Johns’s painting of, as opposed to painting by, numbers creates

a striking antinomy. On the one hand the familiarity of numbers,
combined with the fact that Johns gives them easily recognizable
generic forms, often using stencils, rather than elaborating them
like historiated initials in illuminated manuscripts, seems to rule out
aesthetic responses, making the viewer wonder embarrassedly or
irritatedly what kind of contemplative opportunity is being proposed
for them. In his first sequence of number-paintings, representations
of single numbers he called ‘Figures’, Johns even took steps to
counter any suggestion of a systematic project, explaining that ‘I
didn’t work on them in any order and I deliberately didn’t do them
all, so that there wouldn’t be implied that relationship of moving
through things.’19
And yet the very ordinariness of these number-forms also serves
to highlight by contrast the quality that art historians like to call
‘painterliness’. Roberta Bernstein asserts that ‘Johns rewards the eye
by the sensuous handling of palpable textures of his surfaces’ and
Carolyn Lanchner writes with uncurtailed relish of White Numbers that
the ‘messily meticulous surface alternately seems as delicious as
cookie dough and as fragile as a veil drawn over a dream – a curious
fate for the numerals of decimal narration’.20 The very dullness and
affectless aridity of number is precisely what gives appetite and ex-
citement to the act of painting them, an act that ends up intensifying
rather than depleting the sense of visual significance. As Charlotte
Buel Johnson says of Johns’s Numbers in Color, ‘the numbers have
nothing to do with telephoning. They have nothing to do with bank-
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ing or arithmetic. The numbers in the picture are part of a design.

They have become something new. They are just shapes and colors
repeated and repeated.’21 It is the very unartistic banality of numbers
that is supposed to foreground the strange, even in its way heroic,
self-jeopardizing of the work of art that takes them as subject. This
can lead to the conclusion that the aim and outcome of these paint-
ings is an interrogation of the conditions of perception, as in Roberta
Bernstein’s judgement:

Johns’s Numbers are unique in their singular focus on the

number itself as a formal and conceptual entity. The artist’s
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strategy is to neither [sic] avoid meaning nor hide it. Instead

his Numbers, like his other commonplace objects and signs,
become vehicles for examining the process of perception and
the fluidity of meaning. Johns’s presentation of numbers as
uncertain signs is first and foremost aimed at stimulating
the viewer to awaken the eye and mind to experience what is
most familiar in a new way.22

This is a judgement – a wearily conventional one – about what

art does, not about what the visual force of number-forms might be.
But, armed with the sovereign principle that the most interesting
things about art rarely in fact have anything to do with art, we might
see what there is to say, to say what there is to see, about that force.
Michael Crichton observes the oddity in Johns’s number-
paintings of ‘the idea of representing what is already an abstraction.
A flag is an abstraction, though most people think of it as a piece of
multi-colored cloth. But numbers exist only as intellectual constructs,
and to give them form in a painting is to challenge immediately our
ideas of representation and abstraction.’23 But numbers are abstract,
not in the sense that they can never have any reference to the world,
but in the sense that their reference is not limited to any specific ob-
jects in the world. There is no number that could not in principle
designate a certain number of some thing or other, even if the num-
ber of things that it could so designate is in fact numberless. Not
only this, numbers are themselves countable things, as emphasized
in Johns’s paintings, which suggest that their forms have been phys-
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ically stamped into the material of the painting, like a seal or a brand.
In late works like Numbers cast in bronze of 2005, or the 0–9 cast in
silver of 2008, this blocky, monumental materiality is made con-
spicuous. Numbers belong, I have just been saying, to the order of
adjacency, to a space the principal quality of which is that things lie
next to each other. Johns’s numbers, or more exactly his Numbers,
the sequence of repeating grid-arrangements of the numerals from
0 to 9, are packed tightly together. Rather than floating in space, they
form and entirely fill the space they occupy. Their forms may remind
us of children’s building blocks, or of the stencilled numbers on
packing crates; in either case, there is the suggestion of the block of
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Jasper Johns, Gray Alphabets, 1956.

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Jasper Johns, Map, 1961.

type the purpose of which is to print off signs. It is not surprising

that Johns should have arrived at his number grid through painting
of other gridded forms, notably the alphabetic letters of Gray
Alphabets (1956). But his painting of cartographic forms, as in the
United States map rendered in Map (1961), indicates that it is not the
grid arrangement that is important so much as the idea of a packed
space, of abutting and adjacency leaving no more gaps than a wall
of bricks. Johns shows us a space that is not abstractly and arbitrarily
overlaid with the abstraction of number but rather filled with it.
And it is this principle of saturation that governs the series of
paintings known as 0 through 9, as opposed to the almost identically
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named 0–9 sequence. In these paintings and drawings, the principle

of adjacency required and sustained by the grid is apparently violated,
since the numbers are here superimposed rather than jammed
alongside each other, creating a deep, dense, entangled, scarcely
legible space, as though Johns were rendering simultaneously the
sequence of numbers that used to flash into view at the beginning
of a reel of film. The clue seems to be given by the word ‘through’ in
the title of this series. Each of the numbers is seen through a lattice
formed by the other numbers, creating a pattern of visual inter-
ference which makes it hard to make out any particular number in
its entirety. But this is still a packed space, a space that is full of
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Jasper Johns, 0 through 9, 1961.

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numbers, in which even the interstices between the numbers are part
of the space enclosed by some other number and so will allow room
for nothing but number.
Johns here gives us images of number as the very plenitude of
space, number as the principle that opens and occupies every void.
At times, it might appear as though his aim is in fact to obliterate all
visible space – obnumerate it, we might almost say – by swamping
it with number. Yet it is the visible forms of numbers, still just dis-
cernible and therefore holding the complete indifferentiation of
whiteout or blackout at bay, that make space apprehensible as such.
This is made manifest in the painting Thermometer (1960), in which a
single white line runs down the middle of the painting, reminiscent
of a column of mercury, with two black dots perhaps marking the
positions of freezing point and boiling point. The rest of the picture
is almost an unrelieved black, apart from the curves of what appear
to be numerical calibrations emerging from the murk. To be able to
distinguish is to be able to number, and to be able to number is what
gives space its form.
In 1965 the French–Polish painter Roman Opałka made a start,
with a stroke of white paint signifying the number 1, on what would
be the single work that would occupy him for the rest of his life. He
started at the top left-hand corner and continued painting the
sequence of numbers, 2, 3, 4 and so on, from left to right in closely
compressed lines. Each time he completed a canvas, he began the
next one with the number immediately following the last number
painted on the previous canvas. So, we may say with equal justice
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either that Opałka painted a large number of number-paintings, or

that he only painted one, in a number of instalments. His first can-
vases used white paint on a black background, but, during the 1970s,
Opałka took the decision to begin lightening the background,
adding 1 per cent more white to the pigment with each successive
canvas. He calculated that by the time he reached the number
7777777 (Opałka never employed commas) the numbers would
cease to be visible against their background. Later, Opałka began to
record himself enunciating the numbers as he painted them, and to
take photographs of himself at the end of each day’s work, thus, it
seems, creating an absolute continuity between his life’s work and
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Roman Opałka, detail from 1965/1–∞, Detail 1-35327, 1965.

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his actual life. Opałka’s days were, more literally than any other’s,
numbered. When he died in 2011 at the age of 79, he, or the count,
had reached 5607249.
Karlyn de Jongh writes confidently that Opałka’s practice is ‘a
radical program through which he seeks to portray the passage of
time’.24 Opałka himself has called his work ‘eine Progression, die
die Zeit sowohl dokumentiert als auch definiert’ – ‘a progression
which documents as well as defines time’ – and a ‘Visualisierung der
Zeit’ – ‘visualization of time’.25 But, although the unbroken series of
numbers might give the impression of representing pure duration,
it can do so only in a very abstract and approximate sense. For the
steady sequence of the numbers is an idealization of what in actual
fact was a necessarily discontinuous and episodic enterprise, even if
Opałka did succeed in sustaining it until the end of his life. The clock
of Opałka’s painting practice ticks spasmodically and irregularly.
Whatever the interest of what Opałka is doing, it is nothing as banal
or showy as this kind of temporal allegory. In fact, if Opałka has any
design on time, it is surely rather to show its unshowability, its
unthematizability.
The idea of painting something as theatrical or thematic as the
‘passage of time’ is in fact a derivative, perhaps even a deflection from
the primary activity of which these paintings is composed, of paint-
ing numbers in sequence. Every effort to round this activity up into
some larger (which is also to say smaller) purpose wilfully evades
and effaces its actuality, which lies in its failure to add up to anything.
This is even true of the solemn purposes to which Opałka has
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allowed his work to be dedicated, as when he built an installation

from the sounds of his counting in the Delme synagogue in Lorraine
in 1997:

As with every synagogue, the Delme synagogue shouts out

the memory of the victims of the Shoa; the victims whose
names are crossed out and ‘who were no more than num-
bers’ . . . Every presentation which is more than just the
memory of the number – including all the horror of a past
still young and for ever unforgettable – has seemed to me
out of place. As for my part, I wanted to give another sense
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to the numbers, especially in this place. I have been painting

them and enunciating them for so many years, one after the
other, and thus I have been creating a dynamic uniqueness
of every being – similar to a prayer just told once like a life
only lived once. So my work turns into a testimony, into a
path, into some patient determination to follow them
towards the light.26

Whatever Opałka’s apparent and even declared purposes, what

he in fact devoted his life to was the painting of numbers in sequence,
from one onwards. One might call this an act of counting, except
that nothing is here being counted but numbers themselves. This is
the process of what it is, not any kind of determination to be ‘in the
moment’ or anywhere else; it is in fact a determination to avoid
having been anything at all or in particular. Opałka said in 2009 ‘How
can you understand a thing as stupid as our existence? Maybe that
sounds too brutal, but this existence makes no sense; it is nonsense.
And this nonsense is my work.’27 And the work’s way of avoiding or
denying ontology is through pure number, or, rather, what might
seem to stand on the other side from pure number, the unrelieved
act of numbering.
There are many epiphenomena attending this enterprise. One is
that the white paint used to inscribe the numbers fades as the line
proceeds, so that the brush must be loaded with more paint, usually
after no more than ten numbers, and sometimes after as few as three.
From any kind of distance, the microrhythms formed by these
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fadings and replenishments give a visible texture to the surface of

the painting, like the ruffling of a surface of water, or the layerings
of slate or tree bark, or the textures of squamous skin.
Another syncopation is provided by the fact that there are
frequent mistakes. Indeed, there are miscounts in the very first few
lines of the first painting in the series: there is no 416 between 415
and 417, and the sequence jumps from 425 to 456 missing all the
numbers in between. Later on there is no 3811 or 4004, but two
3999s, two 4006s and two 4552s. Opałka seems not to have sought
to correct these mistakes, though the practice of saying the numbers
out loud he later developed may have been a way of guarding against
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them. Among other things, this makes it clear that Opałka’s paint-
ings are not, as one might otherwise assume, self-enumerating. The
only way to establish whether, by the time he painted the number
5607249, Opałka had in fact painted 5607249 numbers would be –
amazingly, appallingly – to count them.
Far from portraying the pure passage of time, Opałka’s paintings
show just what they set out to show, namely the visibility, or, more
precisely, the making visible, of number. In this, the effect if not also
the purpose of the sequence is not to gratify or congratulate the eye,
by giving it an image of some idea, but to baffle and to nauseate it,
allowing no vantage point or point of rest. Almost all that can be
made out in, or of, Opałka’s work are huge, though not innumerable,
numbers of numbers. There is no way to get any of the pictures in
focus. Like numbers themselves, they are all different, yet different
in precisely the same way. The effect of twinning the images of
numbers with the self-portraits of Opałka’s steadily ageing face is to
suggest the merger of face and figure (the latter in fact derives from
Latin figura, a face), as though the face itself were to be offered as a
sort of graph of the approach to decay and extinction, at once the
contour of an impassioned life, full of life and joy, and the indiffer-
ence of the process by which it is composed and decomposed
through time, as time. Opałka’s face comes to have the look of
number, as his life had number’s shape and tempo.
Opałka’s practice points up the sentimentalism of the practice
of ‘numberism’ of an artist like Sienna Morris. Though she uses
numbers as constituent marks for the figurative forms she designs,
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the numbers themselves are given an emblematic appropriateness

to the artistic subject – so, for example, her drawing of the human
heart is done entirely with equations used by cardiologists to deter-
mine the health of a heart, and, in her portrait of Einstein, the
equations for relativity can be seen curling in the smoke from his
pipe. But this is a purely arbitrary association: insofar as they are not
immediately visible, the numbers into which the visual forms may
be decomposed need not be cardiac or Einsteinian equations, or
indeed equations at all. Opałka’s work, by contrast, offers us no
defence or retreat into anecdotal or philosophical significance from
the exposure to pure, indecipherable ciphering.
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No doubt the popularity of works which appear to be made of

numbers in itself constitutes a sort of general allegory, since we seem
to live in a world that seems more and more to be made of numbers,
or equivalently numerical coded forms, rather than of pure matter.
Such pictures may serve to image the sense that we can never now
go down far enough in nature to arrive at the condition of pure
matter, beneath the condition of number.
The difference between these two modes of visualization is
paralleled by the two near-contradictory ways in which the word
graph is used in mathematics. First of all, and most familiarly, graphs
are visualizations of numbers, typically of functions that produce
variable results over time. But graphs also refer to mathematical
problems that are visual in their nature, that is to say, largely prob-
lems of topology, such as Euler’s bridge problem or the four-colour
problem. The first kind of graph moves from number to image: the
second moves from image to number. In the first kind of graph, n>i,
since the image represents a reduction of number to image, in the
second, i>n, since in it visual form is reduced to number. The two
kinds of graph encode what have often been thought to be the two
essential forms of mathematics: geometry, which may be practised
without recourse to measurement, and algebra, which renders
spatial relations in numerical form.

Numbers in Public
Roman numerals belong to public time, the time of proclamations
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and memorials. Philip Larkin’s evocation in his poem ‘mcmxiv’ of

the world of ‘innocence’ that was swept away by the First World War
depends upon the use of Roman numerals in its title. The numerals
impart to the poem itself a kind of ‘look’, which is internally re-
duplicated within it by the evocation of various kinds of inscription,
words that are not so much read and instantaneously seen, as in a
photographic exposure: ‘the bleached/ Established names on the
sunblinds’; ‘The tin advertisements/ For cocoa and twist’; ‘The place-
names all hazed over/ With flowering grasses’.28 In a certain sense,
this direct visibility is part of the innocence of meaning that the poem
names. There is an implied interpenetration of natural form and
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number in the evolution of the act of political and economic account-

ancy that gridded the country after the Norman Conquest, in the
‘fields/ Shadowing Domesday lines/ Under wheat’s restless silence’.29
Domesday is the name for a certain kind of stopping of the clock for
the purposes of reckoning and the mapping of quantities. A world
of inscriptions of this kind is a world of naturalized number. It is
part of the way in which things last, but is also exposed to what is
about to happen, hinted at in the way in which the word ‘bleached’
seems instantly, and paradoxically, to decay into ‘Established’. The
reckoning that is in store will be made with different kinds of
numbers, in the thousands and millions of dead and injured of the
First World War.
But the world of 1914 was a world in which the compoundings
of image and number had already hugely diversified, for it was a
world in which the graphical representation of variable quantities
had already become commonplace. Just glancing at mathematical
books over the course of 500 years in Europe shows three phases. In
the 1500s, mathematical books were presented as unforgiving blocks
of text, broken up only occasionally by diagrams. By the eighteenth
century, numbers and mathematical symbols occupied much more
of the page, steadily displacing the text. The image of the mathem-
atician’s blackboard completely covered with equations expresses
this phase of mathematical work. But in the third phase, abstract
symbols have given way to concrete visualizations, which are at once
symbolic and iconic, at once an abstract formalization through
numbers, and a concrete visualization of those numbers in terms of
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quantitative magnitudes and relations.

There is one spatial form that is more expressive of numeric
space than any other. The grid, formed of parallel vertical and hori-
zontal lines intersecting at right angles, has for centuries been the
most effective way not only to picture space but to govern it through
numbering operations. In Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll
invites us to imagine a rationalized landscape as laid out like a chess-
board, but this is what all maps and charts had done since Descartes
devised his coordinate system in 1637. By the later nineteenth century
the Cartesian grid had become visible in physical space, as cities
began to be built on this plan. Although the grid rapidly came to be
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thought of as characteristic of modern cities, it had in fact been em-

ployed in many ancient cities. Hippodamus of Miletus designed
many cities in Greece on the grid plan and the design was carried far
to the East by Alexander the Great. That the grid was intimately tied
to number, and the control through abstraction that allowed, is
indicated clearly by the name centuriation, which was given to the
Roman grid system. As Hannah B. Higgins has shown, the grid form
of urban design conjoins the organizing function of two forms – the
brick and the cuneiform tablet – drawing form into information.30
The grid borrows from and displays the two essential principles of
the number system: firstly, the identity of units, each cell of the grid
being regarded as an equivalent numerical element, and, secondly,
ordinality, the ordering, or orderability, of these equivalent elements
in a fixed series that allows for location through counting.
This means that the grid is a uniform space. Any portion of the
grid is completely interchangeable with any other portion, even
though numerical specification also allows for the unique identifi-
cation of individual locations within it. In fact, the two principles
are codependent; there can only be unique identifiers within a
system in which every unit is in principle entirely exchangeable with
any other. Such uniformity implies a certain kind of executive power
that is capable of maintaining singleness of intention. This is why
the grid form of town planning is associated with dictatorship, ab-
solute power or great wealth, since the impediments to be overcome
in reducing an historically irregular space to a spatially homo-
geneous one, laid out to view as though for a single shared eye, are
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considerable.
The space of the city can also recall other kinds of network,
which can occasionally come into a sort of visibility, as in the de-
scription of ‘San Narciso’ in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49:

She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight,

onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all to-
gether, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth;
and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio
to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The
ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle,
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sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing

clarity as the circuit card had.
Though she knew even less about radios than about
Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns
a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to
communicate. There’d seemed no limit to what the printed
circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so
in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled
just past the threshold of her understanding.31

Grids allow for space to be numerized because grids are also the
characteristic forms employed for mechanisms of calculation – like
the abacus, the loom (which, via the punched-card system invented
to govern Jacquard’s loom, gave rise to the computer program but
can be seen as a kind of computational device in itself ) and the cel-
lular arrangements employed for paper calculations.32 The grid
shares many features with the table, and forms which borrow its
principles, like musical scores and entablatures. Michel Foucault has
observed the ways in which the flat surface of the table allowed for a
structure of knowledge that depended on the principle of ordering
things into classes. The table is always a version of the tabula ‘that
enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put
them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according
to names that designate their similarities and their differences – the
table upon which, since the beginning of time, language has inter-
sected space’.33 This intersection of space, or space of intersection,
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is also where language is intersected by number.

For this reason, the table always exists between the actual and
the abstract. The table allows for different items to be laid out and
held open to view alongside each other. A physical table is always
the synecdoche or place-holder for the more abstract space of rela-
tion as such, which is to say, precisely, a space in which places may
be occupied, taken and changed. It is for this reason that a table must
always itself be stable, in order that it can itself encompass variations.
The table comes into being whenever the ground is doubled, the
ground lifted up for the convenience (literally the ‘going-together’)
of eye and hand. The table on which things are arrayed is always the
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Four numerical calculation tables based upon the work of

Johannes Reuchlin, using Hebrew letters, right-hand column,
and numbers, c. 1838, pen and ink.

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James Murray’s
filing system for
the OED.

space between those things, the super always an inter. This remains
the case even with the infinite desktop of the computer, which still
requires the material support of the screen. As the meeting place of
the corporeal and the cerebral, tables are used for eating as well as
for writing and for playing – etymologically, a tavern is a place of
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tables. Lautréamont famously evoked the beauty of the meeting

of an umbrella and a sewing machine on an operating table, but all
tables are operating tables really, in that they all allow operations, of
work and play.34 To eat at a table is to mediate the raw and the cooked,
to make the consumption of food into a social action, which takes
place in a visible space in which I must not only know, and see, my
place, but also recognize that I may change places with anybody else,
whether in secular company or religious communion. The dissection
table or operating table, always, as in Hogarth’s Reward of Cruelty,
depicting the public dissection of a hanged criminal, shows us a kind
of grisly cognitive feast as it displays for inspection the viscera of the
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human body laid out upon it, for visual consumption by the other
bodies gathered round. The protocols of dissection and surgery
remind us of the careful ordering of elements in visible space
required by Leviticus in the sacrifice made at another kind of table,
the tabernacle, or altar, so named because it lifts up what is laid on
it. In the sacred diagram of the sacrifice, as Mary Douglas has shown,
‘position is everything’.35 The table is a place of play and performance,
a place in which place values can be put in play. This makes the board
and ‘the boards’ of the theatre equivalent. To ‘turn the tables’ on
someone literally means to change one player’s position for another,
‘tables’ being the name for backgammon, because it is played with
hinged boards. The chequerboard pattern of the chessboard and the
tablecloth images this reversibility, which has been, as it were, folded
into the space of the table itself to become part of its texture. In all
of this, the equivalence of spaces and the elements distributed
between them makes of the table a countable space, a space open to
number. Commensality is commensurality.
The grid also has a central significance in modern art. Grid
arrangements seem ubiquitous and tenaciously long-lived, featuring
in the work of Mondrian, Malevich, Klee, Reinhardt, Martin, Warhol,
Andre and, as we have seen, Jasper Johns. The point of the grid,
asserts Rosalind Krauss, is to proclaim the modernist autonomy of
art. The grids employed to determine perspective in the work of
Leonardo and Dürer were not really grids in the modern sense,
because they were devised to enable a mapping of the real onto the
two-dimensional surface of the artwork. The modernist grid, by con-
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trast, displays the fact of displaying nothing but its own ordering
schema: ‘In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the
realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is anti-natural,
anti-mimetic, anti-real. It is what art looks like when it turns its back
on nature.’36 The painting organized like a grid is not imitating the
world, but indicating its own powers of visual organization.
This is, however, a surpassingly strange claim either for art, or
for art criticism on its behalf, to make. For the very thing that makes
the grid count as a regulatory space is the fact that it recalls all of the
many kinds of spatial arrangement of this kind that have become
familiar, in maps, plans, diagrams, games, puzzles and designs of
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every kind. It may be that the modernist grid subjects the real to the
‘overall regularity of its organization’, but it can scarcely be that ‘this
is the result not of imitation, but of aesthetic decree’.37 The art of the
grid asserts its absolute autonomy by mimicking something else –
geometrically regularized space. That is, art asserts its autonomy
through heteronomy, demonstrating its independence through its
dependence on something else (given the ubiquity of grid arrange-
ments in modern life, one might say its dependence on almost every-
thing else). Grids need not themselves be numbered, but they belong
to the large class of objects that now appear available for numerical
operations. Krauss acknowledges this duality in her observations on
the two kinds of grid that feature in modernist art, in one of which
the grid extends, like the number line, infinitely outwards from the
frame of the painting, the other of which ‘is an introjection of the
boundaries of the world into the interior of the image: it is a mapping
of the space inside the frame onto itself ’.38 But the two operations
are really equivalent: the modernist grid can only turn in on itself
by implicating itself in a general economy of gridded spaces. The
look of a modernist grid is in fact the dominant form taken by the
look of number.
The coordinate space of the grid is typically without depth
(though this in fact depends on the number of dimensions that the
coordinate space includes). For this reason, the Cartesian grid is a
route to the mathematical projection of n-dimensional spaces,
through the simple addition of axes on which to add coordinates. So
one might imagine, beyond the horizontal axis x, the vertical axis y
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and the z axis of depth at right angles to both, limitless other axes,
at different angles of incidence. Once again, we may see – or almost
seem to see – the innumerable arising from the enumerable.
Peter Greenaway has employed the flat, grid-like spatiality of the
picture plane to complicate the construction of and response to the
moving image. Greenaway has spoken of his attraction to the simple
play of horizontals and verticals, remarking, in an interview with
John Petrakis in 1997:

I’m looking all the time for alternatives to storytelling. My

films are very much based on horizontals and verticals. It’s
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a grid situation. Also lists, number counts and alphabetical

counts. Not that I believe intrinsically in any particular magic
in these systems, but they are well-defined, well-wrought
systems of organization.39

Visual arrangements are put into counterpoint with narrative,

which Greenaway regards with a certain tolerant suspicion, being
unwilling to abandon it entirely, but remaining wary of its factitious
satisfactions. Drowning by Numbers is the Greenaway film in which
the conflict between the ongoing time of narrative and the screen as
a space of merely numerical unfolding is most clearly marked.
Speaking with Hartmut Buchholz and Uwe Kuenzel in 1988, Green-
away evoked the interplay between the inner core of narrative and
the outer armature of number:

I use two skeletons – one builds the core and the other
creates the outer form. If from one point of view all this
sounds trivial – well, it most certainly is. But naturally I
incorporate another idea: I believe that we have very narrow
margins to express our ‘free will.’ Ostensibly, we are capable
of making decisions, but these decisions are really very
limited. The film should exhibit this by having its story as
inner skeleton embed itself in an outer one which reveals
this limitation – something like fate, though I don’t like the
word. Our lives, after all, are circumscribed by conditions
over which we have no control – our surroundings, the
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climate, our personal contingent relationships. For me, the

mathematical structures signify those boundaries that
constrain us.40

Drowning by Numbers is an intensely if also playfully English film,

with its references to game playing and rule giving, its hints of Lewis
Carroll, Agatha Christie and detective story. But, like many other
Greenaway films, it seems to inhabit the intersection between the
corporeal and the abstract – sexuality and pattern, decomposition
and composition (hence the importance of insects, rationally seg-
mented creatures who are associated with decay), the desire for death
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and the death of desire. The two coordinate systems that seem to be
placed perpendicular to each other are sex and number, approxi-
mating to the corporeal and the cerebral. The film’s narrative is
concerned exclusively with sex, as the most inclusive form of bodily
desire. A sequence of three men are drowned for reasons of sexual
inadequacy, an impotence that seems to be associated with their
obsession with pattern, number and game. The three murderers,
all named Cissie Colpitts, ensure that they escape retribution by
promising sexual favours to the coroner Madgett, and seem to get
away with it. At the end of the film, Madgett sits, naked, in a scuttled
rowboat, possibly about to become the fourth victim of drowning.
Meanwhile, his son Smut has hanged himself, following his own
self-circumcision. If this act seems like an irruption into the ludic
dream of the film of something like the violence of the real, even this
reality is conveyed by and contained with a game structure, as Smut
himself narrates his own suicide: ‘The object of this game is to dare
to fall with a noose around your neck from a place sufficiently off the
ground such that a fall will hang you. The object of the game is to
punish those who have caused great unhappiness by their selfish
actions. This is the best game of all because the winner is also the
loser and the judge’s decision is always final.’41 Games hold violence
at bay, but they also, as we are reminded throughout the film, lead
to and are led by violence; Madgett’s obsession is with a history of
injuries incurred in sport, including this episode: ‘1931? Chapman
Ridger? Australia? A blow on the chest (He thumps his chest) . . . Hits
51 runs . . . then has heart palpitations for twelve hours – a cracked
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rib enters the lungs . . . coughing blood, dies the next day in bed with
a blonde surfer called Adelaine.’42
Finality is promised by number, even as numbers, which go on
for ever, also defy finality, making for variability, repetition and
reversal. In the end, it is hard to know where the film stands in rela-
tion to the work of number – or even what we might mean by ‘the
film’. Is it the narrative that is conveyed by the film, a narrative that
has everything to do with counting, or is it the mere succession of
its numbered frames, which in this case have actually been num-
bered for us, in the various signposts that have been strewn through
the film, from the number 1 painted on a tree trunk in the opening
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moments of the film, through numbers made more or less conspicu-

ous all the way through to the 100 painted on the sinking rowboat
in which Madgett sits? Greenaway notes the evasive, anaesthetic
powers of counting, which enables us to evade death, even as that
evasion is itself deathly:

Counting is like taking aspirin – it numbs the senses and

protects the counter from reality. Counting makes even
hideous events bearable as simply more of the same – the
counting of wedding rings, spectacles teeth and bodies
dissociates them from their context, to make the ultimate
obscene blasphemy of bureaucratic insensitivity. Engage
the mind with numbing recitation to make it empty of
reaction.43

But it is not as easy as might be thought to thematize number, or

give it its secure place in relation to what we see played out in the
narrative or theme of the film. The men count, obsessively, as part
of their evasive or suspensive game playing; but so do the women, as
part of their serious work of murder. The skipping girl who opens
the film counts the uncountable through proxy (her chant names a
hundred stars and stops because ‘a hundred is enough. Once you
have counted one hundred, all other hundreds are the same’), while
Smut counts the accidents of violent deaths.44 In the end, the appar-
ent significance of the struggle between male and female, and the
corporeal and the abstract that it approximates, is itself dissolved in
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the universal solution that is simple numbering, which both runs

through all the action and is orthogonal to it. It is as though the film
were like Carroll’s Red King, muttering to itself, and to us, ‘Impor-
tant – unimportant.’45 It is a film that is as delicious to think and
write about watching as it is almost intolerable to watch, in its in-
human ticking off of the seconds and minutes, and the remorseless
and indifferent equivalence of beauty and violence. Seeing number
and seeing numerically, which can so often be a form of visual
triumph over the unassimilable phenomenality of appearance, is
here shown or seen as a kind of pathology, a pathology that seems
to go with the grain of vision itself. The only remission from the
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order of number seems to be in the rhapsodic registering through

the film of the unpredictable and incalculable movements of wind,
water and flame – the number 1 was painted on a tree that had
actually been toppled by the freak hurricane that blew across south-
ern England in October 1987, and was artificially set upright for
the film.46 As he edited the film, Greenaway began to decompose it
into ever smaller constituents, opening up a Borgesian infinity of
numerable and permutable elements:

Nearly every day for three weeks, I watched the film through
the many print-stages – each one moving closer to a fully
graded print that would satisfy. I enjoyed watching every one
and – sometimes admittedly compensating for its familiarity
– I began to see the film in different ways. One of those ways
was by observing the small gestures. Sometimes I watched
the film entirely through its small gestures.
The green eye of the corpse that swings on the post in the
light of the lighthouse . . . the plop of the invisible frog that
jumps in the pond in the night-garden behind the titles . . .
the light on Nancy’s breasts in the brown and orange atmos-
phere of the apple-garden . . . the rumble of the apples as
they are tipped from the tin-tub under the apple trees.47

Though Greenaway has been at pains to emphasize the ways in

which numerical frameworks constrain, number also seems to lead
to proliferation. As so often, numeration seems to encourage ever
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greater numbers of numbers. As well as giving visual signals of the

count from one to a hundred through the film, Greenaway buried
significant numbers in it. The bedroom inhabited by coroner
Madgett contains a hundred objects starting with the letter M, while
his son Smut has a hundred objects beginning with the letter S.48 In
one scene, Bruegel’s painting Children’s Games is shown resting on an
easel by Madgett’s bed. Greenaway observes of the painting that
‘every game – 84 of them – can be identified and most of them are
still played in some variation today.’49
Drowning by Numbers seems to have been the stimulus for a
series of other Greenaway projects that would continue the work of
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counting, onwards and outwards from the closed 1–100 series that
counts the film off and out. The film spawned a plan for an eight-
hour tv serial to be called Fear of Drowning, which Greenaway
described in an interview with Stuart Morgan in 1983. The film
was to trace the life of Cissie Colpitts up to the age of eighteen, on
the date that the Lumière brothers patented the first cine camera,
making her life parallel the history of the cinema:

It shows that she inherited both her gameplaying and her

terror of drowning from her father, a man called Cribb. Every
episode will contain a different game. The first, learned from
a shipwrecked Italian sailor, Cribb plays on a beach to
determine his daughter’s future. It involves drawing squares,
each of which is your destiny. You play hopscotch and throw
rocks. Where they land indicates patterns of behaviour.
Another, the Lobster Quadrille, is an obstacle race relating
to all the fears sailors have of the sea: deep chasms in the
China Sea, the aurora borealis, the Sargasso Sea, the Strait
of Magellan, all represented in miniaturized, allegorical
form as obstacles on the beach. The games become grander,
first involving a man and his child; then a man, his wife, and
child; then maybe twenty people; then finally about five
hundred players. The last game is cataclysmic; Cribb dies
just as Cissie reaches the age of 18.50

The project continued to grow in Greenaway’s mind. In 1989 he

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wrote that the plan for the Fear of Drowning serial now encompassed
nine parts: ‘Each episode would increase in length, starting at twenty
minutes and increasing in five-minute increments until 115-minute
Drowning by Numbers was reached.’51

Polygraphs
Number charts and graphs are images that are generated from num-
bers. Increasingly, these images furnish imaginary landscapes that
allow us an increasingly intimate and quasi-corporeal inhabitation
of a world, not so much of numerical quantities, but numerical
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relations. Thus we may feel ourselves to be on a ‘steep learning curve’,

or indeed be ‘behind the curve’, to have ‘plateaued out’, or be ‘in a
trough’. We may also be ‘on the spectrum’, ‘at our peak’ or some-
times even ‘off the scale’. What has become known as the ‘uncanny
valley’ suggests a particular place, but is in fact the region of a graph,
described in 1970 by Masahiro Mori, in which the otherwise steadily
increasing pleasure in the verisimilitude of an artificial human figure
suddenly, at the point of near-indistinguishability, dips into uneasi-
ness.52 We are nagged incessantly about how bad what are called
‘linear’ processes are. We worry, or sometimes tell ourselves to take
no account of ‘outliers’. When we speak metaphorically of getting a
larger or smaller slice of the pie, it is no longer clear if we are think-
ing of an actual pie or the image of a pie, nor are we sure whether
‘spikes’, in viewing figures or electricity supply, are to be thought of
as direct images, of an object or sensation, or secondary images, of
the form of which we may be reminded by the shape of a graph.
Share prices ‘nosedive’ or enter ‘a spiral’, anxieties ‘escalate’ and
profits, like vital signs, can ‘flatline’. Audrey Jaffe’s The Affective
Life of the Average Man has mapped the way in which nineteenth-
century fiction itself began to show the correlation of individual
emotional states with statistical representations of well-being like
the share-price graph.53 During the 1870s, the word ‘polygraph’
began to be applied to the ‘signatures’ of various bodily processes –
pulse, respiration, blood pressure, skin conductivity. The lie-
detecting polygraph was developed for forensic use by John
Augustus Larson in 1921, though names like the ‘emotograph’ and
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‘respondograph’ were tried out by rivals.54 Larson himself proposed

to call his machine the ‘cardio-pneumo-psychogram’.55 One of the
most mysterious operations made possible through such bodily
mediations is biofeedback, in which subjects prove able to modify
bodily functions through focusing on their graphical outputs,
through instruments such as the electromyograph, which measures
muscle tensions, the thermistor, which measures skin temperature,
the electrodermograph, which measures skin conductance, and the
electroencephelograph, which measures the amplitudes of electrical
activity in the brain. All of these instruments provide graphical
displays of variable numerical values, whether in digits or in images.
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These graphical images somehow seem to embody the actuality

sufficiently concretely for them to allow for immediate modification
of the values they encode.
Mathematical visualizations allow for a kind of mathematics that,
though generated from and continually transformed by numerical
operations, goes far beyond number, or perhaps takes number far
beyond itself. All of this depends upon the computer, which reduces
things to numerical values in order to transcend number, attaining
to the innumerable by passing through the enumerable.
In its capacity to create visualizations, the computer is a self-
transcending machine. It creates formalized models that are com-
plex enough to approach the condition of what is being modelled.
Richard S. Palais describes the process of using mathematical
visualizations to create images of what he calls ‘mathematical objects’
and processes that show such objects under transformation.56 When
such objects come close to representing not just abstract or idealized
models of mathematical functions, but the contingent shapes that
approach, or fall away from, the idealized or regular form, we may
say that the usual direction of things has been reversed: that the
rational has not been derived from an abstraction of the real, but the
real has been derived from a hyper-abstraction of the rational. To
speak of seeing number now does not mean seeing the ways in
which visual appearances approach or diverge from ideal or abstract
forms, but rather seeing the numerality of visual forms as such.
This brings about a further, increasingly wonderful inversion.
Whereas mathematical modelling has tended to represent numerical
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relations as waves, trees, streams, spirals and other natural forms,

now the natural forms themselves begin to be apprehensible as the
pure appearances of number. Under such conditions of visualization
a tree becomes readable as a massively detailed mathematical mod-
elling of itself, in many dimensions. The visual appearance of the tree
is a kind of metaphor for the multi-parameter calculus of different
kinds of ratio and quantity – light levels, nutrients, absorption and
transpiration of water, exposure to the chances of disease and
damage and possibilities of self-defence and repair – that is what the
system of physical relations we know as a tree consists of. Among
the most striking rhymes between the abstract forms in which
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information is visually encoded and embodied forms of natural

process is the network. Manuel Lima has suggested that the network
may be recursively at work in all understanding of information, such
that networks are read by other networks: ‘It has been proven that
networks are a ubiquitous topology in nature, and a type of encoding
similar to fractal encoding might exist in our minds . . . Perhaps we
have a propensity for structures similar to our own brain.’57 It is a
three-dimensional equivalent of the map drawn on a scale of one
mile to the mile that is imagined in Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno
Concluded. When Borges reimagined this idea in his short story ‘On
Exactitude in Science’, he added to it a note of melancholy ridicule,
since a map on such a scale is seen to be useless, so that it is
abandoned and survives only in tattered ruins in desert regions.58
But Carroll anticipates a much more dramatic step:

‘It has never been spread out, yet,’ said Mein Herr: ‘the
farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country,
and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself,
as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.’59

Carroll asks us to imagine a world of forms that might be re-

garded as their own maps. One of the most amazing embodiments
of this is the fact that, viewed from high in the atmosphere, weather
systems look so much like the diagrams with which we represent
them. Maps and graphs are annotated pictures and, though it is
often convenient for all the annotations to be visible and present in
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the text, digital encoding means that it does not have to be. What
has been called ‘augmented reality’ allows for the information, quan-
titative and otherwise, to be brought into conjunction with the image
when it is needed, in just the way that a mobile navigation system
calls up whatever local map may be required at a particular moment.
It is this which has persuaded Michel Serres that we have moved
from what he calls the declarative to the procedural.60 A model or a
map reduces the complexity of what it models or maps because it
aims to show it all at once, in a conspectus, rather than in bit-by-bit
detail. This declarative order of a model or map is apparent rather
than emergent. Thus, the local fluctuations of suicide rates or numbers
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of undelivered letters in Paris yield a stable image of a normal

distribution that spatializes and thus makes visible a process that, as
it emerges in time, is concealed. But digital storage allows for a
different form of map, or model of the model, in which one does not
need to have the whole map accessible in order to be able to access
its relevant portion. The speed of the computer allows for all the in-
formation of the map to be kept available in distributed form, which
allows one to select only that portion of the map that is needed. I do
not need a table on which to unfold the map of Britain, or Australia,
in order to locate myself on a map of Paddington.
Thus the whole map, of the country, the genome, or whatever
system of information is in question, is virtual and emergent, and its
visibility is contingent, modular and on-demand. This makes it more
temporal than spatial, especially since the speed with which individual
images can be refreshed allows for the display of movements as well
as states of data. In this, the map, or the model, come to converge
with the nature of the system in itself. A system like an oak tree or an
occluded front is not an all-at-once phenomenon: its values, along
many different axes and dimensions, are constantly being adjusted.
Its visible condition is simply a state of the system. But the fact that
this is a system that in principle is capable of being modelled, and in
this newly procedural way, allows us to see its contingency, not as the
real that escapes or underlies the rational real, the unnumbered form
of quantitative relations, but as the projection or diagram-in-the-
making of those numerous numerical values. We have turned quantity
into geometry or graphic form; and, as a consequence and accom-
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paniment, we have made graphic form full of number. The anomalous

name for this amalgam between the graphic and the numerical,
anomalous because there is nothing ‘given’ about it, is ‘data’. We see
the shape and shaping of number everywhere, not only as the ways in
which we might render it quantitatively but as the way in which it
shapes itself. Number comes in and out of visibility; and visibility just
is this coming in and out of appearance of number. Number is not
only mediated in visual form, it mediates between word and image. In
our world, the eye is becoming ever more numerate.
One of the most important enabling features of this numerizing of
shape and surface is the development of new forms of mathematical
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geometry, which themselves seem to operate in some realm between

appearance and number. Early twentieth-century art responded
energetically to the higher-dimensional geometry developed in the
second half of the nineteenth century, and a figure such as the knot,
which features in the art and magical practice of many cultures, has
been made into a newly mathematical figure by the branch of topol-
ogy known as knot theory. Though much of knot theory appears
independent of number, it continues to depend upon numerical re-
lationships. This opens the possibility of discerning the spatialized
mathematics at work in the symbolism of different cultures, as sug-
gested in Susanne Küchler’s discussion of the function of the knot
in making visible complex logical relationships within a culture:

a knot is not referential but synthetic, in relating inextricably

the texture of its surface to the logic of binding. Unlike the
open mesh of the looped string, the knot does not hint at
what lies beneath its surface, but is itself to be discovered
beneath its own surface. The knot is all that is to be seen.
The knot is the knowledge, a knowledge of the linking of
things, material and mental, that may as well exist apart.61

This is very different from the manner of seeing that reduces

appearances to the ultimate or essential mathematical forms and
relations of which they are the approximations – the Golden Section,
or the Platonic Solids. Numbers here are no longer what lie beneath
or behind the fluctuations of form, nor do they prescribe the ultimate
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regularities towards which they tend. Numbers measure the process

whereby things move in and out of the condition of form, which is
to say of repeatability. Number is therefore immanently at work at
every moment. The idea that the world is governed by certain ideal
proportions must abstract those proportions from the actual visible
world. Numbering used to belong or conduce wholly to the rational,
which is to say the regular. In our world, number has gone native,
blending with and binding to the irregular, the variant, the stochastic.
The visual form of the quantitative imagination used to be the
‘geometric’ – rational grids, orderly networks and the standardized,
soul-sapping ‘little boxes’ lamented in the Malvina Reynolds song
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released by Pete Seeger in 1963 – but it is rapidly becoming visible

as trees, helices, waves, vortices and radiations of all kinds. Mathe-
matics depends, not just on the symbols that signify quantities, but
on the forms of notation developed to perform mathematical
operations with those quantities. The forms of nature, drawn into
forms of visual quantality, are themselves becoming legible as
notations as well as values, not just the result of mathematics, but
the animate appearances of mathematics being done. We do
mathematics, not just on the world, but in and with it. By a century
ago, physics, the study of the visible, tangible and material world,
had become almost entirely mathematical. It is less often observed
that an inverse process has also been occurring over that century.
Precisely because physics has become mathematics, it has become
possible for mathematics to become physics, becoming ever more
visibly embodied. Turning stuff into number has made it possible
for number to become stuff. Numerus caro factus est; the number has
become flesh.
In one sense, this is a subjection of the world of nature to human
processes. The age of the world picture spoken of by Heidegger, in
which nature is made available for technological manipulation, has
moved into a new phase, in which the physical world is made over
into information.62 As Orit Halperin observes, this means that the
process of what is called ‘visualization’ changes from a psychological
to a technical process, undertaken through various kinds of proce-
dure independently of specific acts of human cognition.63 In such a
world, it is not so much that data and calculative procedures are
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made visible in space, as that ‘space becomes “smart” through new

models of sense, measure, and calculation’ (Beautiful Data, 29). A
world that is not only the object of calculating rationality but is itself
an active participant in that rationality is enabled and accelerated
by turning ‘a world of ontology, description and materiality to one
of communication, prediction, and virtuality’ (Beautiful Data, 40).
Understanding the world as a network of entities in communication
with each other required just the generalization of the understanding
of communication that was provided by Claude Shannon’s mathem-
atical theory of communication.64 Beginning as an attempt to render
the act of communication in mathematical terms, this became a
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theory of the mathematical basis and functioning of all communi-

cation, conceived statistically as information. A general theory of
communication, and a theory of general communication, requires
the idea of general computation. Communication needs computa-
tion perhaps because, as Shannon proposes, communication is
computation. It is not just that there are more and more ways of
envisaging quantities, magnitudes and numerical relations, nor even
that visual space has increasingly been subject to calculative proce-
dures, not least, of course, in the pursuit of various forms of profit,
or to avoid various kinds of loss, or minus quantity, which in our
world takes on ever more positive and substantially visible forms. It
is also that the entry of number and computation into appearance
has made possible the autonomization of visual space that Halperin
calls ‘communicative objectivity’, aiming at ‘informational infinitude’
(Beautiful Data, 84) and characterized by ‘the production of algo-
rithms, methods, and processes that facilitate interaction, based on
the assumption of stored information always/already available’
(Beautiful Data, 94). In such an epistemological regimen, perception
and cognition are no longer distinguished, ‘to see and to think being
analogized into a single channel’ (Beautiful Data, 95).
Of course, the appearances of things in the world are not in
themselves numerical, for they will always require translation and
mediation to turn them into pure number. Whether we are talking
about the icon that announces the successful completion of a cash
withdrawal, the swinging open of a subway barrier on production of
a smartcard or the sequencing of a traffic light, we may say that num-
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ber, frequency and quantity have entered deeply into appearance. In

a sense, these visual signs may be thought of as algebraic: that is, as
nonspecific placeholders for numerical values that have no need to
be supplied.

Beauty
It is clear that there is very great utility in the visual display of quan-
titative information, especially in making larger patterns evident that
might otherwise be lost in the welter of numbers. But there seems
to be another gain, which goes beyond utility, in that such displays
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seem often to be thought, and said to be, beautiful. The importance

of beauty in mathematics is one of the most dependable clichés: no
conversation about the difference between science and art can
proceed for very long without somebody issuing the that’s-that
announcement: ‘But of course mathematicians think beauty is
important too.’ Many more questions might be asked about this
intended showstopper than usually are. Given how much agony
there has been among philosophers and critics about precisely what
constitutes beauty and how it may be determined, it is charming but
odd that mathematicians, or those who speak on their behalf,
apparently have no difficulty in knowing it when they see it. The
assumption that value in the arts is centred on beauty is also slightly
embarrassing; for some considerable time now, critics have been
much more interested in art that is interesting rather than beautiful,
probably because when it comes to making work interesting they are
such interested parties.
In any case, the proliferation of ‘beautiful data’, or the idea that
the visualization of data can produce beauty, provides an occasion
to reflect on the work that number might be doing in ideas about
beauty and that even more elusive notion, the ‘aesthetic’. In order to
do this, we would do well to try to substitute some sensible notions
for the mystical and overheated discourse to which discussions of
beauty can lead. There are, of course, many different kinds of thing
that may be seen as beautiful, or visually pleasurable, but amid this
diversity there is arguably a large class of things in which the appre-
hension of pattern, arrangement or symmetry is to the fore in the
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judgement. It has been suggested that many organisms on earth tend

to find symmetrical forms beautiful because symmetry is expensive
in terms of natural resources:

The flower or animal with symmetry is sending out a very

clear signal of its genetic superiority over its neighbours.
That is why the animal world is populated by shapes that
strive for perfect balance. Humans and animals are geneti-
cally programmed to look upon these shapes as beautiful –
we are attracted to those animals whose genetic make-up is
so superior they can use energy to make symmetry.65
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Though we can be forgiven for not noticing it amid the inces-

santly designed forms of our human world, orderliness is in fact rare
in nature. From the viewpoint of information theory, order involves
redundancy, or recurrence, which may be given a mathematical defi-
nition as a compression or economy of resources. The more orderly
a system is, the closer it will come to an abstract description of the
system; the more chaotic and less orderly it is, the less susceptible it
is of description by an abstract formula.
This principle was itself formalized neatly by the American
mathematician G. D. Birkhoff in his largely forgotten book Aesthetic
Measure (1933): ‘it is the intuitive estimate of the amount of order O
inherent in the aesthetic object, as compared with its complexity C,
from which arises the derivative feeling of the aesthetic measure M
of the different objects of the class involved’ – or M = O/C.66 Birk-
hoff ’s work was carried forward in the light of the statistical princi-
ples of information theory in the work of Max Bense.67 Birkhoff ’s
title provides a nice and perhaps even recursive ambivalence. On the
one hand, it points to a way of measuring the feeling of beauty or
satisfaction in works of art – a ‘quantitative index of their compara-
tive aesthetic effectiveness’.68 On the other, it points to the implicit
mensuration involved in any feeling of the aesthetic: the pleasure
one takes from a work of art involves one in taking the measure of
that pleasure. Such a view may seem a little perverse and indigestibly
abstract in its form, but it is quite easy to draw it into accord with
other, less obviously mathematical but still economic or quantitative,
readings of the effects of art, especially psychological theories like
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those of Freud or I. A. Richards (neither of whom Birkhoff mentions).

It might even be squared with Kantian aesthetics, though Birkhoff
remarks of Kant’s writing only that ‘there is evident a strong
tendency to adopt a mystical view towards art . . . [and] little that can
be regarded as analytical’.69 Kant distinguishes between the beautiful
and the sublime on the grounds that the feeling of the beautiful is
‘coupled with the representation of quality’, whereas that of the
sublime is linked to ‘that of quantity’.70 This is because, whereas the
sensation of the beautiful is related to some, usually natural, object,
that of the sublime is related to a judgement or sensation in the
observer:
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The beautiful in nature is a question of the form of the object,

and this consists in limitation, whereas the sublime is to be
found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immedi-
ately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representa-
tion of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its
totality.71

What follows, in sections 25–7 of the Critique of Judgement, is a

discussion of the mathematical form of the sublime – though, unlike
Burke, who takes magnitude or the infinite to be just one form of the
sublime, Kant seems to see this mathematical component in all
instances of the sublime. He aims to show that ‘the sublime is that, the
mere capacity of thinking which evidences a faculty of mind transcending every
standard of the senses,’ as opposed to more relative and therefore more
strictly mathematical judgements of greater or less.72 It is very hard
to see how this therefore proves the sublime to be essentially quan-
titative, or, rather, it is hard to see how the feeling of the beautiful,
which involves the idea of limit, can itself be separated from any kind
of quantitative judgement. We may spare ourselves the toil of trying
to square Kantian aesthetics in detail with information theory – while
nevertheless observing that a kind of quantality, the sense of scale
and relative magnitude, attends all of his strange but strangely
compelling thinking about so-called aesthetic feelings.
In principle, we might perhaps say that infographics and
visualized data may seem beautiful because they allow and display
this compression of contingent detail into pattern. But the important
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thing to note is that economization through pattern does not inten-

sify the sense of beauty in order evenly and uninterruptedly, for there
will always come a point at which redundancy will seem merely
repetitious and therefore mechanical. Beauty of this kind seems to
need the sense of a pattern emerging from the midst of contingency,
regulating but not entirely subsuming or subduing that contingency.
So when we are assured that number, in the form of visualized data,
is beautiful, it may be that we are recognizing the importance of
number in the idea of beauty itself. Perhaps all visual pleasure is in
part a pleasure in the commanding exercise of vision itself, and
perhaps that pleasure is a function of the economic gain in being
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able to see more than the eye can ordinarily see, or make sense of in
what it sees, through various kinds of summing numerical symbol-
ism. Perhaps, that is to say, our pleasure in the many forms in which
the statistical is displayed is itself statistical. If there is pleasure in
the look of numbers, perhaps it is because of the numbers game that
is always being played out in looking.
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 10
Eno ugh

I have had occasion in the course of this book to consider some of

the ways in which, among many other things, the reading and writ-
ing of books may themselves be seen and lived as what I have called
quantical. The final stages of writing a book certainly seem to be
when the process becomes, if not a completely mathematical affair,
then certainly a matter more and more of ratio, of weights and meas-
ures, lengths and proportions, extensions and extractions. In its final
stages, in the midst of which I promise I am literally writing these
words, a book, which will have been for some years indeterminate
as regards its length and components, starts to become more and
more a kind of object you can take the measure of, with the possi-
bility of assuming a substantial, material existence in the world. At
this point, word-counting, estimating, balancing and the drawing
up of accounts start to become more compelling and comprehend-
ing procedures than before. One of the great pleasures of seeing a
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book in proof is finally seeing how many pages it has amounted to,
like the outcome of the guess-the-weight-of-the-cake competitions
that may still somewhere be played in summer fairs, or the strange
ritual of telling people not only that your new baby is safely arrived
but also its birthweight (why?). For me, the best part of writing the
kinds of book I get to write comes a little further on still, and is
actually dependent on there being page numbers, namely, the com-
piling of an index. I have never understood how authors can delegate
this most delicious of tasks to someone else, since it allows one a
final, glorious reprise of the whole enterprise, yet without the need to
produce a single extra word (while also enabling one last, sometimes
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surrealistically astonishing, reshuffle of its contents). I am sure that,

following Vladimir Nabokov who, in Pale Fire, wrote a novel consist-
ing very largely of endnotes, somebody must have written a text
consisting solely of the index to some other, absent text.
Agreeable though it is, in a way, to arrive at the point of writing
a conclusion, I have never felt quite confident of knowing what a con-
clusion is for and consequently how to write one. A conclusion may
be said to be in part a kind of reassurance for the reader that enough
is indeed enough, that they have not been short-changed, or wearied
by unnecessary expatiation. But how much is enough? And how
much, in a conclusion, is enough to show that there is enough of a
book at its back to earn the right to write the conclusion one is
writing? Say what you are going to say, say it, then say what you have
said, goes the approved formula. But if you have to say what you have
said, if there is really something still to say about what you have said,
might it not mean that you have not in fact fully said it yet? If you still
need a conclusion, in other words, it may be too early for it.
Yet a conclusion must always in some sense also exhibit its own
gratuity, confirming for the benefit of both reader and writer that the
book actually needs nothing more. This makes a conclusion very lit-
erally an exercise in redundancy, in the way in which I have defined it
in Chapter Seven, as the amount of information required to transmit
a message minus the amount of information needed for the message
itself. This implies that a conclusion can only be the right length if
there is just a touch too much of it. It can only succeed in confirming
that the book it completes is not only (almost) complete, but also en-
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tire, if it persuades the reader that the book was in fact already entire
before the conclusion that superfluously declares it to be over and out.
Oddly enough, as I sit here doing that very thing, and at the point
where it ought to be clearer than ever before how much of the road
remains before me, I find myself taken up in a more open-ended
kind of proceeding than at almost any point in writing the other parts
of the book. How much should I be shooting for in this conclusion?
If the function of a conclusion is to demonstrate, without too much
fuss or circumstance, that it has no real function to fulfil at all, it can be
an unexpectedly ticklish job to judge just how much unnecessariness
is strictly necessary at such a juncture.
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The conclusion can only really confirm the integrity of the work
that it seals and concludes by standing at a little distance from it. The
thing that confirms and, as Jacques Derrida would certainly say,
countersigns the work is always a sort of outwork, a little gazebo or
porter’s lodge built at some distance from the main building – or the
extra, rather runtish little roll you make with the leftover pastry, that
never has quite enough jam in it.
So much, perhaps a little too much, for quantical reflexivity, and
on, if possible, to one or two more substantial topics.
It is generally a bad idea to write a book explaining why some-
thing else is a bad idea, but I fear I may sometimes have come close
to doing that in the book you have just read, or are wondering
whether to bother reading. If I have sometimes been unnecessarily
and unconvincingly absolute in my characterization and condemna-
tion of the allergy to number and the anti-quantitative prejudice in
what I have called the humanities, a term which may be both too
spongy and too spikily specific, I would like to think that it has been
in the interest of intimating some new ways of thinking about num-
ber and quantity. Some time ago, I abandoned what among many
academics is regarded as a sacred duty and sustaining vocation,
namely the practice of critique, a practice that in its academic forms
is usually as pompous as it is footling. But it is not the danger of
being thought pompous or footling myself, real and present though
that may be, that is my reason for trying to steer clear of critique. The
reason is that showing people how bad their ideas are is never a good
idea if you genuinely want them to adopt new ones. You may in fact
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just encourage them to think that if their ideas can only be dismissed
in so pompous or footling a fashion, they must have something in
them after all. The deployers of critique of course, like the denoun-
cers of sin, are rarely very interested in getting people to think other
or better things than the ones that are being critiqued, since that
would make further critique unnecessary, a gloomy prospect for
those whose salaries and sense of self-worth depend on there being
endless things in need of critique. Safer, therefore, to find something
as irremediable as it is insufferable against which to rail. Still, if you
really are interested in talking people out of bad ideas, the only way
is to seduce them with the prospect of new, good ones. Readers of
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my chapter on the measures of pleasure will know that by good ideas

I mean ideas that seem to promise more profit, under whatever
understandings of profit will seem to weigh most compellingly,
depending. There’s no alternative to tasting the cake, or at least
putting it on the scales.
Yet I am not completely confident that brand-new ideas are in
any case what have been on offer here. Perhaps it is a weakness to
which anyone arguing a case of which they are convinced is liable, to
be unable to see why anybody could ever have believed anything else.
But I have been guided in the arguments I have tried to put together
in these chapters, about the importance of number in thinking about
death, horror, reading, play, religion, chance, history, jokes, pleasure,
sex, music and visual information, by the quiet conviction that we
are all of us already virtuosi, if more unconsciously than we might
be, in the arts of quantical thinking and feeling. We may not always
know if something is worth it, or even how to make the calculation,
but I cannot conceive the state of mind of anyone who could not
understand the force of such a question. This may be because we
necessarily have to ask and answer such questions in everything that
we do, as a function of the kinds of being we are – or because, in fact,
our individual and collective being cannot be better understood than
as itself an ongoing calculus, balancing different kinds of input and
output, investment and return, energy and information budgets. Ac-
cordingly, I have tried to make it my business less to broach thrilling
or bracingly arduous new intellectual possibilities than to articulate
some of the kinds of thing that it would be impossible for a sentient
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being in the twenty-first century not already to know and feel, with
respect to what I have called, in a possibly rather numbing shorthand,
the order of number. So this is not a book for mathematicians, or
not for mathematicians, if there are any, who only want to read about
mathematics. My book does not try to explain things we do not
understand about number so much as try to explain that, and why,
we may not sufficiently realize how much we already do understand,
or at least assume about it. We not only do not know how to think
and feel outside considerations of more and less, we do not want to
know, since we do not know what wanting itself could ever be
outside such quantical considerations.
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 l i v i n g b y n u m b e rs

This should not be taken to imply that the force or order of

number in human affairs is given and invariant. Not all the argu-
ments made in this book are historical, though, taken as a whole,
the book has an historical inflection and itinerary. Ian Hacking’s no-
tion that we have been subject since the late nineteenth century to an
‘avalanche of number’ programmes much of the thinking about
modern experiences of quantification. This view implies a kind of
historical fall into number, though out of what blessedly Edenic
state I cannot myself imagine, for I do not believe that there has ever
been a time in which considerations of more and less can ever
have been inconspicuous or of no account to human beings. So, if
things have changed, the change is itself best understood in quanti-
tative terms, rather than as any kind of qualitative shift. There are, it
seems, many more ways than ever before in which questions of more
and less may or must be transacted in modern life. For recent and
contemporary humans, I have said, number is neither on the side of
the human, nor on the side of the inhuman, but in the turbulent
middle between them, a middle that number itself animates and
agitates. Because number is involved, in many different ways, in
these transactions of value, it is dull and dimming to think that one
could assign any particular kind of value to number itself. My aim,
therefore, has not been to settle the question for or against number,
but rather (to employ a bit of committee-speak of which I have always
been fond), to move the motion that the question be now put.
Perhaps the most important thing about the case I have made
about the awareness and experience of number is that what I just
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now incautiously called ‘the order of number’ is not all that orderly
and so certainly not uniform. The number of number does not cancel
down to one.
Just as little eligible for being counted-as-one is the question of
economics. I realize that there may be many nowadays who will
assume that to consider the impact of number on modern life is
nothing more than to register the reduction of everything in modern
life to economics, or, cutting that long story briskly short, the
experience of ‘capitalism’. A. J. Ayer remarks, of a somewhat earlier
commanding idea, that ‘a hypothesis which explains everything, in
the sense that nothing is counted as refuting it, explains nothing.’1
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One might press further and say that the more something explains,
the less likely it is in fact to exist. And there seems truly to be nothing
that the fact of capitalism, the greatest and most indubitable Count-
As-One of our time, is not thought to be able to explain. If I have not
discussed economics in any straightforward and set-apart way, I hope
it will be clear from what I have written that this is not at all because
I doubt its importance. On the contrary, it is because I am convinced
that economics is at work always and everywhere in human affairs,
but in so pervasive and so variegated a way that it makes no kind of
sense to suggest that economic questions might be quarantined from
all other areas. In this respect, and encouraged by the perspectives I
take from information theory, I imply and assume a general economy
of economies, monetary, sexual, biological, linguistic, religious and
political.
Such a view sits well with my prejudice that the only kind of sub-
ject on which it is worthwhile to write a book is one that a single
book has no chance of summing up. So I am reassured rather than
rattled by the thought of the many different topics that might have
been considered in this book but, for almost entirely quantical
reasons, have not been. (Where are the discussions of calendars, or
crosswords, or the chapter I meant to write on the imagination of
negatives and minus quantities, for example? Brooding yet, if
anywhere, in the teeming womb of time.) You can only finish a book,
people are weary of me telling them, if you are able to imagine a
plausible string of sequels to it. A large part of the pleasure that
accompanies the cooling of the furor scribendi in finishing a book of
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this kind is that it frees one to imagine completely different ways in

which the whole enterprise might have been undertaken. You may
recognize here the well-known device of using a conclusion to
demonstrate that, far from being any kind of definitive statement,
the preceding book has in fact been no more than a prolegomenon
to the real work that remains to be done, like the plumber who uses
the opportunity of replacing a tap washer to demonstrate that you
need an entire new central heating system. In any case, I hope not to
have had the final word or got anywhere near the bottom line as far
as quantality and the culture of number are concerned. That will have
to be, at least for me, for now, enough.
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Connor, Steven. Living by Numbers : In Defence of Quantity, Reaktion Books, Limited, 2016. ProQuest Ebook
 r efer enc es

one: Ver nacular Mathematics

1 George Eliot, Adam Bede, ed. Carol A. Martin (Oxford, 2008), p. 209.
2 Samuel Beckett, Collected Shorter Prose, 1945–1980 (London, 1984),
p. 80.
3 Terence (Publius Terentius Afer), The Woman of Andros. The Self-
tormentor. The Eunuch, ed. and trans. John Barsby (Cambridge, ma,
2001), pp. 185–7.
4 Ian Dury, ‘Police Will Not Probe Break-ins at Homes With Odd
Number’, Daily Mail (6 August 2015), pp. 1–2.
5 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge, 1990), p. 2.
6 Ibid., p. 41.
7 Ibid., p. 141.
8 Ibid., p. 63.
9 William Petty, Five Essays in Political Arithmetick (London, 1687).
10 Hacking, Taming of Chance, p. 141.
11 Quentin Meillassoux, The Number and the Siren: A Decipherment of
Mallarmé’s Coup de Dés, trans. Robin Mackay (New York, 2012),
p. 39.
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12 Ibid., pp. 45–6.

13 Ibid., p. 74.
14 Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World, and Other Writings, ed. Kate
Lilley (London, 1994), p. 171.
15 Ibid., p. 172.
16 Ibid.
17 George Lakoff and Rafael Nuñez, Where Mathematics Comes From: How
the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being (New York, 2001), p. xi.

two: Quantality
1 Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers, trans. Robin Mackay (Cambridge
and Malden, ma, 2008), pp. 89–92.

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 l i v i n g b y n u m b e rs

2 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York
and London, 1998), p. 229.
3 Nathaniel Fairfax, A Treatise of the Bulk and Selvedge of the World: Wherein
the Greatness, Littleness, and Lastingness of Bodies are Freely Handled
(London, 1674), p. 110.
4 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 4th edn (London, 1975), p. 213.
5 A. N. Whitehead, Religion in the Making (Cambridge, 2011), p. 5.
6 William Shakespeare, Othello, 3rd Arden edn, ed. E.A.J. Honigmann
(Walton-on-Thames, 1996), Act 1 Scene 3, p. 159.
7 A. N. Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge, 1920), pp. 142–3.
8 Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand On (London, 2012), pp. 112–13.
9 Ibid., p. 113.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 121.
12 Michel Serres, L’Incandescent (Paris, 2003), pp. 369–70.
13 Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus), On the Nature of the Universe, trans.
R. E. Latham (London, 1994), 2.402–8, p. 47.
14 Whitehead, Religion in the Making, p. 112.
15 Ibid.
16 John Allin and Thomas Shepard, A Defence of the Answer Made Unto the
Nine Questions or Positions Sent from New-England, Against the Reply Thereto
by that Reverend Servant of Christ, Mr. John Ball . . . (London, 1648), p. 46.
17 William Shakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 3rd Arden edn, ed. Henry
Woodhuysen (London, 1998), Act v Scene 2, p. 264.
18 James Elphinstone, Propriety Ascertained in Her Picture; or, Inglish Speech
and Spelling Rendered Mutual Guides, 2 vols (London, 1786–7), vol. ii,
pp. 83, 109.
19 Francis Thompson, Literary Criticisms of Francis Thompson: Newly
Discovered and Collected, ed. Terence L. Connolly (New York, 1948),
p. 303.
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20 Ibid., p. 302.
21 Ibid., pp. 304, 303.
22 Ibid., p. 303.
23 Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture (Cambridge, ma, 1979).
24 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’, The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
trans. James Strachey, vol. xi (London, 1957), pp. 155–61.
25 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 3rd Arden edn, ed. Juliet
Dusinberre (London, 2006), Act iii Scene 5, p. 285.
26 Samuel Beckett, Molloy. Malone Dies. The Unnamable (London, 1973),
p. 179; Samuel Beckett, Malone meurt (Paris, 1971), p. 7.
27 Garrett Stewart, Death Sentences: Styles of Dying in British Fiction
(Cambridge, ma, 1984), p. 321.

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 references

28 William Shakespeare, Sonnets, 3rd Arden edn, ed. Katherine Duncan-

Jones (Walton-on-Thames, 1997), 367.
29 John Keats, Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London, Oxford and
New York, 1970), p. 208; Samuel Beckett, More Pricks Than Kicks, ed.
Cassandra Nelson (London, 2010), p. 14.
30 Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (London,
1970), p. 124.
31 Steven Connor, ‘Spelling Things Out’, New Literary History, xlv (2014),
pp. 183–97.
32 Steven Connor, ‘Michel Serres: The Hard and the Soft’ (2009). Online
at http://stevenconnor.com/hardsoft.html.
33 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford, 1993), p. 46.
34 Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres, vol. i: Bubbles: Microspherology, trans. Wieland
Hoban (Los Angeles, ca, 2011), p. 12.
35 Ibid., p. 51.
36 Ibid., p. 24.
37 Jeremy Gray, Plato’s Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics
(Princeton, nj, 2009).
38 A. N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York, 1948), p. 34.
39 Badiou, Number and Numbers, pp. 1, 3.
40 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening
(Hanover, nh, 1998).
41 Michel Serres, Rameaux (Paris, 2007), p. 184 (my translation).
42 Ibid., p. 185.
43 William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols (New York, 1890),
vol. i, pp. 318–19.
44 Claude Shannon, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, Bell
System Technical Journal, xxvii (1948), pp. 379–423, 623–56. Online at
http://worrydream.com.
45 Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, trans. Josué V.
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore, md, and London, 1982), p. 79.
46 Ibid., p. 80.
47 Ibid., p. 81.
48 Ibid.

thr ee: Hor ror of Number

1 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London, 1999), p. 52.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., p. 53.
4 G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge, 1992), p. 37.
5 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-
Glass: And What Alice Found There, ed. Peter Hunt (Oxford, 2009), p. 226.

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 l i v i n g b y n u m b e rs

6 Stanislas Dehaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics
(London, 1999), p. 76.
7 Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction
(Oxford, 2000), pp. 45–6.
8 Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant
(Bloomington and Indianapolis, in, 1993), p. 164.
9 Kermode, Sense of an Ending, p. 46.
10 Marquis de Sade, The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings, ed. and
trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (New York, 1966).
11 Samuel Beckett, No’s Knife: Collected Shorter Prose, 1945–66 (London,
1967), p. 9.
12 Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense (London, 1952), p. 65.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., p. 67, my emphasis.
15 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford, 2008),
p. 339.
16 Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (London,
1920), p. 56.
17 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Medusa’s Head’, The Standard Edition of the
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. xviii, trans. James Strachey
(London, 1955), p. 273.
18 Carroll, Alice, p. 105.
19 Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (Berkeley and Los Angeles, ca, 1966),
p. 66 (quoting Géza Róheim).
20 Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror: or Paradoxes of the Heart (New
York, 1990), pp. 32–3.
21 Abraham Seidenberg, ‘The Ritual Origin of Counting’, Archive for the
History of Exact Sciences, ii (1962), p. 9.
22 E. T. Bell, The Magic of Numbers (New York, 1946), p. 161.
23 William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, 3rd Arden edn, ed.
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Giorgio Melchiori (London, 2000), Act v Scene 1, p. 271; Antony and

Cleopatra, 3rd Arden edn, ed. John Wilders (London, 1995), Act iv
Scene 15, p. 269.
24 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition
of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. xviii, trans. James
Strachey (London, 1955), p. 54.
25 Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho (London, 1983), pp. 32, 33.

four : Moder n Measur es

1 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Stevie Davies (London, 2006), p. 82.
2 George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Rosemary Ashton (London, 1994),
p. 140.

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 references

3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays, ed. Larzer Ziff
(London and New York, 2003), p. 335.
4 Ibid., pp. 335–6.
5 Ibid., p. 223.
6 Ibid., p. 252.
7 Ibid., p. 295.
8 Walter Pater, Studies in the History of the Renaissance, ed. Matthew
Beaumont (Oxford, 2010), p. 119.
9 Ibid., p. 120.
10 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Jane Garnett (Oxford, 2006),
p. 123.
11 Ibid., p. 81.
12 F. R. Leavis, ‘Mass Civilization and Minority Culture’, in Popular
Culture: A Reader, ed. Raiford A. Guins and Omayra Zaragoza Cruz
(London, 2005), p. 36.
13 Ibid., p. 33.
14 Francis Galton, ‘The Measure of Fidget’, Nature (1885), xxxii,
pp. 174–5.
15 Francis Galton, ‘Arithmetic by Smell’, Psychological Review, I (1892),
pp. 61–2.
16 Edmund Husserl, Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical
Investigations; With Supplementary Texts from 1887–1901, trans. Dallas
Willard (Dordrecht and London, 2003).
17 Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the
Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago, il, 1998), p. 29.
18 W. H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957 (London, 1969),
pp. 319–20.
19 Ibid., p. 320.
20 E. M. Forster, Howards End (New York, 1989), p. 30.
21 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Literary Intelligentsia (London, 1992).

22 D. H. Lawrence, Complete Poems, ed. Vivian de Sola Pinto and F. Warren
Roberts (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 431.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid., p. 441.
25 Ibid., pp. 355–6.
26 D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (Harmondsworth, 1960), p. 115.
27 Ibid., p. 525.
28 Ibid., pp. 117–18.
29 D. H. Lawrence, Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and Other Prose
Works, ed. Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore (New York, 1970),
p. 266.
30 Ibid.

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 l i v i n g b y n u m b e rs

31 Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, ed. Hermione Lee (London, 2000),

p. 214.
32 Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (London, 1934), p. 232.
33 Virginia Woolf, Selected Essays, ed. David Bradshaw (Oxford, 2010),
p. 9.
34 Kim Shirkhani, ‘Small Language and Big Men in Virginia Woolf ’,
Studies in the Novel, xliii (2011), p. 56.
35 Woolf, Selected Essays, p. 9.
36 Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, ed. G. Patton Wright (London, 1992),
p. 14.
37 Virginia Woolf, The Years, ed. Steven Connor and Susan Hill (London,
2000), p. 254.
38 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of
Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (London, 1910), p. 227.
39 James Joyce, Letters, 3 vols, ed. Stuart Gilbert and Richard Ellmann
(London, 1957–66), vol. ii, p. 134.
40 May Sinclair, Life and Death of Harriett Frean (London, 1980), p. 1.
References, to hf, in the text hereafter.
41 Samuel Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (London, 1984), p. 476.
42 Michel Serres, Récits d’humanisme (Paris, 2006), p. 41.
43 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry
Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1969), p. 236.
44 James Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (Oxford, 1993), p. 267.
45 James Joyce, Finnegans Wake (London, 1971), p. 8.
46 Joyce, Ulysses, pp. 279, 267.
47 Garrett Stewart, ‘Cinécriture: Modernism’s Flicker Effect’, New
Literary History, xxix (1998), p. 729.
48 Anthony Burgess, Re Joyce (New York, 1969), p. 69.
49 Quoted in Oliver Lodge, The Ether of Space (New York and London,
1909), p. 113.
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50 Joyce, Ulysses, p. 220.

51 Hermann Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis
for the Theory of Music, trans. Alexander Ellis (London, 1875).
52 Ibid., p. 46.
53 Bertrand Russell, ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’, Monist, xxii (1912),
p. 326.
54 Henri Bergson, The Meaning of the War: Life and Matter in Conflict
(London and Edinburgh, 1915), pp. 46–7.
55 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and
W. Scott Palmer (London, 1911), p. 268.
56 Ibid.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., pp. 265, 266.

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 references

59 Ibid., p. 260.
60 Bergson, Time and Free Will, p. 12.
61 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York,
1911), pp. 270–71.
62 Russell. ‘The Philosophy of Bergson’, p. 333.
63 Eric A. Cornell and Carl E. Wieman, ‘The Bose–Einstein Condensate’,
Scientific American, cclxxviii (1998), pp. 40–45.
64 Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H.
Mackenzie, 4th edn (London, 1970), p. 52.
65 Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film, c. 1900
(New Haven, ct, and London, 2007), p. 194.
66 Stewart, ‘Cinécriture: Modernism’s Flicker Effect’, p. 731.
67 Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Harmondsworth, 1980),
p. 127.
68 Ibid., p. 131.
69 Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts From the Diary of Virginia
Woolf, ed. Leonard Woolf (London, 1981), p. 17. References, to wd,
in the text hereafter.
70 Virginia Woolf, The Waves (London, 1980), p. 170.
71 Ibid., p. 102.
72 Ibid., p. 20.
73 Ibid., p. 27.
74 Woolf, The Years, p. 254.
75 Samuel Beckett, Molloy. Malone Dies. The Unnamable (London, 1973),
p. 18.
76 Ibid.
77 Bergson, Matter and Memory, p. 260.
78 Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry
(London, 1950), p. 3.
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

five: Lots
1 Samuel Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works (London, 1984), p. 116.
2 W. B. Yeats, Essays and Introductions (London, 1961), p. 215.
3 Ibid., p. 216.
4 Ibid.
5 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith,
revd and ed. Nicholas Walker (Oxford, 2007), p. 82.
6 Ibid., p. 83.
7 Ibid., p. 81.
8 Kant, Critique of Judgement, pp. 80–81.
9 I-Hwa Yi, Korea’s Pastimes and Customs: A Social History (Paramus, nj,
2006), p. 227.

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 l i v i n g b y n u m b e rs

10 Ben Jonson, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David
Bevington, Martin Butler and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols (Cambridge,
2012), vol. ii, pp. 402–3; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard
Tuck (Cambridge, 1996), p. 82; Richard Levin, ‘Counting Sieve Holes
in Jonson and Hobbes’, Notes and Queries, xlix (2002), p. 250.
11 Pieter W. van der Horst, ‘Sortes: Sacred Books as Oracles in Late
Antiquity’, in The Use of Sacred Books in the Ancient World, ed. L. V.
Rutgers, P. W. van der Horst, H. W. Havelaar and L. Teugels (Leuven,
1988), p. 149.
12 Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk
Religion (Philadelphia, pa, 2004), p. 216.
13 Van der Horst, ‘Sortes’, p. 157.
14 Louis Jacobs, The Jewish Religion: A Companion (Oxford, 1995), p. 132.
15 Van der Horst, ‘Sortes’, p. 165.
16 Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition, p. 209.
17 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(London, 2002), p. 19.
18 Sammy Githuku, ‘Taboos on Counting’, in Interpreting the Old Testament
in Africa: Papers from the International Symposium on Africa and the Old
Testament in Nairobi, October 1999, ed. Mary Getui, Knut Holter and
Victor Zinkuratire (New York, 2001), pp. 113–18.
19 Abraham Seidenberg, ‘The Ritual Origin of Counting’, Archive for
History of Exact Sciences, ii (1962), p. 15.
20 Claudia Zaslavsky, Africa Counts: Number and Pattern in African Cultures,
3rd edn (Chicago, il, 1999), p. 51.
21 Seidenberg, ‘Ritual Origin of Counting’, p. 16.
22 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the
Age of Empire (London, 2004), pp. 99, xiv. References, to Multitude, in
the text hereafter.
23 Peter Sloterdijk, God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms, trans.
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Wieland Hoban (Cambridge, 2009), p. 96.

24 Chris Harman, Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx
(Chicago, il, 2010), p. 12.
25 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of
Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York,
2006), p. 57.
26 Joerg Rieger and Kwok Pui-lan, Occupy Religion: Theology of the
Multitude (Plymouth, 2012), pp. 59–61.
27 Bernhard Citron, ‘The Multitude in the Synoptic Gospels’, Scottish
Journal of Theology, vii (1954), p. 410.
28 Jinkwan Kwon, ‘Minjung (the Multitude), Historical Symbol of Jesus
Christ’, Asia Journal of Theology, xxiv (2010), pp. 153–71; Hyo-Dong
Lee, Spirit, Qi, and the Multitude: A Comparative Theology for the Democracy

280

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 references

of Creation (New York, 2014), p. 229.

29 Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson
(Ann Arbor, mi, 1995), pp. 2–3.
30 Ibid., p. 2.
31 Ibid., pp. 4–5.
32 Edward Smedley, Hugh James Rose and Henry John Rose, eds,
Encyclopaedia Metropolitana, or, Universal Dictionary of Knowledge . . .
29 vols (London, 1845), vol. i, p. 391.
33 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological
Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (London, 1984), p. 351.

six: Hilar ious Ar ithmetic

1 Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis,
mn, and London, 2007), p. 86.
2 Brian Rotman, Ad Infinitum: The Ghost in Turing’s Machine: Taking God
Out of Mathematics and Putting the Body Back In (Stanford, ca, 1993).
3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith,
revd and ed. Nicholas Walker (Oxford, 2007), p. 161.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., p. 162.
8 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, The Standard
Edition of the Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. viii, trans. James
Strachey (London, 1960), p. 53.
9 Ibid., p. 59.
10 Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense (London, 1952), p. 65.
11 M.B.W. Tent, The Prince of Mathematics: Carl Friedrich Gauss (Wellesley,
ma, 2006), pp. 33–5.
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

12 Samuel Beckett, Watt (London, 1972), p. 46.

13 Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. Paul Schlicke (Oxford, 2008), p. 8.
14 Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, ed. Angus Calder
(Harmondsworth, 1965), p. 84.
15 Ibid., pp. 84–5.
16 Ibid., p. 85.
17 Ibid., p. 96.
18 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, trans.
Cloudesley Brereton and Fred Rothwell (New York, 1914), pp. 4–5.
19 Ibid., p. 4.
20 Beckett, Watt, p. 171.
21 Ibid., pp. 173–4.
22 Ibid., pp. 178–9.

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 l i v i n g b y n u m b e rs

23 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees, trans.

Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White (Oxford, 1975), p. 128.
24 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-
Glass: And What Alice Found There, ed. Peter Hunt (Oxford, 2009),
p. 104.
25 Chris Ackerley, Obscure Locks, Simple Keys: The Annotated ‘Watt’
(Tallahassee, fl, 2005), pp. 160–61.
26 G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 150–51.
27 Ibid., p. 151.
28 Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, ed. Margaret Cardwell (Oxford
and New York, 1991), p. 66.
29 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic
Act (Ithaca, ny, 1981), p. 102.
30 Steven Connor, A Philosophy of Sport (London, 2011), pp. 151–6.
31 Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, trans.
Mario Wenning (New York, 2010).
32 Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Leibniz: Selections, ed. Philip P. Wiener
(New York, 1951), p. 51.
33 Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
(Oxford, 1907), p. 2. References, to Introduction, in the text hereafter.
34 Wesley C. Mitchell, ‘Bentham’s Felicific Calculus’, Political Science
Quarterly, xxxiii (1918), p. 180.
35 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London, 1990),
p. 147.
36 Ibid., pp. 89, 148.
37 Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis,
mn, and London, 2007), p. 87.

seven: Playing the Numbers

Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

1 Thomas Hardy, Complete Poems, ed. James Gibson (Basingstoke,

2001), p. 7.
2 Robert Newsom, A Likely Story: Probability and Play in Fiction (New
Brunswick, nj, and London, 1988).
3 Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly
Improbable (London, 2007), p. 127.
4 F. N. David, Games, Gods and Gambling (London, 1962), pp. 7–8.
5 Roland Barthes, ‘Réflexions sur un manuel’, in L’enseignement de la
littérature, ed. Serge Doubrovsky and Tzvetan Todorov (Paris, 1981),
p. 64.
6 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History
(London, 2007), p. 92. References, to Graphs, Maps, Trees, in the text
hereafter.

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 references

7 Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another (London,
2004).
8 Leonard Mlodinow, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our
Lives (London, 2008), pp. 165–8.
9 Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings
of Life (London, 1996), p. 65.
10 Tristan Tzara, ‘Pour faire un poème dadaïste’, Littérature, xv (1920),
p. 18 (my translation).
11 Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. Peter
Raby (Oxford, 2008), p. 265.
12 Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the
Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Oxford, 1989), p. 91.
13 William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, 3rd Arden edn, ed. John
Wilders (London and New York, 1995), Act v Scene 2, p. 276.
14 Natasha Lushetich, ‘Ludus Populi: The Practice of Nonsense’, Theatre
Journal, lxiii (2011), pp. 33, 34.
15 Ibid., pp. 29, 35.
16 Ibid., p. 34.
17 Gary Saul Morson, ‘Contingency and Poetics’, Philosophy and
Literature, xxii (1998), p. 295.
18 Ibid., p. 300.
19 Keith Devlin, The Unfinished Game: Pascal, Fermat, and the Seventeenth-
century Letter That Made the World Modern (New York, 2008).
20 Deborah J. Bennett, Randomness (Cambridge, ma, and London, 1998),
pp. 132–51.

eight: Keeping the Beat

1 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcok
and Alice Walker (Cambridge, 1936), p. 77.
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

2 Oliver Goldsmith, Works, 4 vols (Edinburgh, 1892), vol. i, p. 385.

3 Edward Wadham, English Versification: A Complete Practical Guide to the
Whole Subject (London, 1869), p. 114.
4 Ibid.
5 John Dryden, Sylvae, or, The Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies (London,
1684), sig. a6v.
6 John Foster, An Essay on the Different Nature of Accent and Quantity, With
Their Use and Application in the Pronunciation of the English, Latin, and Greek
Languages (Eton, 1762), pp. 98, 99.
7 Samuel Parr, A Discourse on Education and on the Plans Pursued in Charity-
schools (London, 1785), p. 3.
8 Thomas De Laune and Benjamin Keach, Tropologia, or, A Key to Open
Scripture Metaphors (London, 1681), p. 3.

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 l i v i n g b y n u m b e rs

9 Thomas Sprat, ‘An Account of the Life of Mr. Abraham Cowley’,

in The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley (London, 1668), sig. b1v.
10 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, In the Original, From
the Most Authentic Manuscripts . . . ed. Thomas Morell (London, 1737),
pp. xxv–xxvi.
11 Stanislas Dehaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics
(London, 1999).
12 Simon Jarvis, ‘Prosody as Cognition’, Critical Quarterly, xl (1998),
pp. 5, 6.
13 Ibid., p. 10.
14 Simon Jarvis, ‘The Music of Thinking: Hegel and the Phenomenology
of Prosody’, Paragraph, xxviii (2005), p. 58.
15 Ibid., p. 64.
16 Ibid., p. 63.
17 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York, 2007),
p. 17.
18 Ibid., p. 21.
19 A. P. Juschkewitsch and Ju. Ch. Kopelewitsch, ‘La correspondance
de Leibniz avec Goldbach’, Studia Leibnitiana, xx (1988), p. 182.
20 Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (London, 2007),
p. 215.
21 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, 2 vols,
trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York, 1969), vol. i, p. 256.
22 Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Philosophical Papers and Letters:
A Selection, ed. and trans. Leroy E. Loemker, 2nd edn (Dordrecht,
Boston and London, 1989), p. 641.
23 Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (London, 2008),
p. 255.
24 Ibid., p. 256.
25 Ibid., p. 260 n.2.
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

26 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 3rd Arden edn, ed. Juliet
Dusinberre (London, 2006), Act v Scene 4, p. 344.
27 John Perceval, A Narrative of the Treatment Experienced by a Gentleman,
During a State of Mental Derangement; Designed to Explain the Causes and
the Nature of Insanity, and to Expose the Injudicious Conduct Pursued Towards
Many Unfortunate Sufferers Under That Calamity (London, 1840),
pp. 304–5.
28 Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further
Adventures of a Curious Character (London, 2007), p. 57.
29 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-
Glass: And What Alice Found There, ed. Peter Hunt (Oxford, 2009), p. 63.
30 R.H.F. Scott, Jean-Baptiste Lully (London, 1973), pp. 115–17.
31 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, nc, 1993), p. 181.

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 references

References, to Tendencies, in the text hereafter.

32 Sigmund Freud, ‘A Child is Being Beaten’, The Standard Edition of the
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. xvii, trans. James Strachey
et al. (London, 1955), pp. 179, 185.
33 William Niederland, ‘Early Auditory Experiences, Beating Fantasies,
and Primal Scene’, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, xiii (1958),
pp. 471–504.
34 Simon Jarvis, ‘The Melodics of Long Poems’, Textual Practice, xxiv
(2010), p. 609.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid., p. 617.
37 Ibid., p. 618.
38 Michel Serres, Musique (Paris, 2011), pp. 43–4 (my translation).
39 Konstantin V. Zenkin, ‘On the Religious Foundations of A. F. Losev’s
Philosophy of Music’, Studies in East European Thought, lvi (2004),
p. 161.
40 Jarvis, ‘Prosody as Cognition’, p. 6.
41 Fred Kersten, ‘Can Sartre Count?’, Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, xxxiv (1974), p. 342.
42 Schopenhauer, World as Will and Representation, vol. i, p. 264; Kersten,
‘Can Sartre Count?’, p. 353.

nine: The Numerate Eye

1 Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling, ed. Tony
Bromham (Basingstoke, 1986), Act ii Scene 2, p. 69.
2 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 3rd Arden edn, ed. Ann Thompson
and Neil Taylor (London, 2006), Act v Scene 2, p. 441.
3 William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, 3rd Arden edn, ed. David
Bevington (Walton-on-Thames, 1998), Act ii Scene 3, pp. 257–8.
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

4 Katherine Hunt, ‘Convenient Characters: Numerical Tables in

William Godbid’s Printed Books’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance,
vi (2014). Online at www.northernrenaissance.org.
5 E. L. Kaufman, M. W. Lord, T. W. Reese and J. Volkmann, ‘The
Discrimination of Visual Number’, American Journal of Psychology,
lxii (1949), pp. 498–525.
6 Stanislas Dehaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics
(London, 1999), pp. 13–40.
7 Karl Menninger, Number Words and Number Symbols: A Cultural History
of Numbers, trans. Paul Broneer (Cambridge, ma, and London, 1969),
p. 317.
8 Katherine Hunt and Rebecca Tomlin, ‘Editorial: Numbers in Early
Modern Writing’, Journal of the Northern Renaissance, VI (2014). Online

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 l i v i n g b y n u m b e rs

at www.northernrenaissance.org.
9 Rebecca Tomlin, ‘Sixteenth-century Humanism, Printing and
Authorial Self-fashioning: The Case of James Peele’, Journal
of the Northern Renaissance, VI (2014). Online at www.
northernrenaissance.org.
10 Lisa Wilde, ‘“Whiche elles shuld farre excelle mans mynde”:
Numerical Reason in Robert Recorde’s Ground of Artes’, Journal
of the Northern Renaissance, vi (2014). Online at www.
northernrenaissance.org.
11 Francis Galton, ‘Visualised Numerals’, Nature, xxi (1880), pp. 252–6,
494–5; ‘Visualised Numerals’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute,
x (1881), pp. 85–102.
12 Galton, ‘Visualised Numerals’ (1881), p. 88.
13 Dehaene, Number Sense, p. 80.
14 Francis Galton, ‘Statistics of Mental Imagery’, Mind, v (1880),
pp. 301–18.
15 Francis Galton, Natural Inheritance (London, 1889), pp. 63–5.
16 Bulent Atalay, Math and the Mona Lisa: The Art and Science of Leonardo
da Vinci (Washington, dc, 2004), p. 27.
17 Robert Tubbs, Mathematics in Twentieth-century Literature and Art:
Content, Form, Meaning (Baltimore, md, 2014).
18 Roberta Bernstein, ‘Numbers’, in Jasper Johns: Seeing With the Mind’s
Eye, ed. Gary Garrels (San Francisco and New Haven, ct, 2012),
p. 44.
19 Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe
(New York, 1998), p. 108.
20 Ibid., p. 46; Carolyn Lanchner, Jasper Johns (New York, 2009), p. 17.
21 Charlotte Buel Johnson, ‘Numbers in Color’, School Arts, lxii (1962),
p. 35.
22 Bernstein, ‘Numbers’, p. 55.
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

23 Michael Crichton, Jasper Johns, 2nd edn (London, 1994), p. 89.

24 Karlyn de Jongh, ‘Time in the Art of Roman Opalka, Tatsuo Miyajima,
and Rene Rietmeyer’, Kronoscope, x (2010), p. 92.
25 Roman Opalka (Munich, London and New York, 1999), n.p.
26 Ibid.
27 Roman Opałka, quoted in Peter Lodermeyer, Karlyn De Jongh and
Sarah Gold, Personal Structures: Time – Space – Existence (Cologne, 2009),
p. 43.
28 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London and
Boston, 1988), p. 127.
29 Ibid.
30 Hannah B. Higgins, The Grid Book (Cambridge, ma, 2009), pp. 13–49.
31 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (London, 2000), pp. 14–15.

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 references

32 James Essinger, Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-loom Led to the Birth of the
Information Age (Oxford, 2004).
33 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
(London, 2002), p. xix.
34 Comte de Lautréamont (Isidore-Lucien Ducasse), Maldoror and Poems,
trans. Paul Knight (London, 1988), p. 189.
35 Mary Douglas, Leviticus as Literature (Oxford, 1999), p. 75.
36 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, October, ix (1979), p. 50.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., p. 61.
39 Peter Greenaway, Interviews, ed. Vernon Gras and Marguerite Gras
(Jackson, mi, 2000), p. 174.
40 Ibid., p. 54.
41 Peter Greenaway, Drowning by Numbers (London, 1988), p. 111.
42 Ibid., p. 57.
43 Peter Greenaway, Fear of Drowning by Numbers/Règles du Jeu, trans.
Barbara Dent, Danièle Rivière and Bruno Alcala (Paris, 1989),
pp. 23–4.
44 Greenaway, Drowning by Numbers, p. 4.
45 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-
Glass: And What Alice Found There, ed. Peter Hunt (Oxford, 2009),
p. 104.
46 Greenaway, Fear of Drowning by Numbers/Règles du Jeu, p. 25.
47 Ibid., p. 123.
48 Greenaway, Interviews, p. 75.
49 Greenaway, Fear of Drowning by Numbers/Règles du Jeu, p. 43.
50 Greenaway, Interviews, p. 19.
51 Greenaway, Fear of Drowning by Numbers/Règles du Jeu, p. 125.
52 Masahiro Mori, ‘The Uncanny Valley’, trans. Karl F. MacDorman
and Norri Kageki, ieee Spectrum (June 2012). Online at
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

http:// spectrum.ieee.org.
53 Audrey Jaffe, The Affective Life of the Average Man: The Victorian Novel
and the Stock-Market Graph (Columbus, oh, 2010).
54 Ken Alder, The Lie Detectors: The History of an American Obsession (New
York, 2007), p. 80.
55 John A. Larson, ‘The Cardio-pneumo-psychogram and its Use in
the Study of the Emotions, with Practical Application’, Journal of
Experimental Psychology, v (1922), pp. 323–8.
56 Richard S. Palais, ‘The Visualization of Mathematics: Towards a
Mathematical Exploratorium’, Notices of the American Mathematical
Society, xlvi (1999), p. 650.
57 Manuel Lima, Visual Complexity: Information Mapping Patterns
of Information (New York, 2011), p. 224.

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 l i v i n g b y n u m b e rs

58 Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York
and London, 1998), p. 320.
59 Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (London and New York,
1893), p. 169.
60 Michel Serres, Rameaux (Paris, 2007), pp. 184–5.
61 Susanne Küchler, ‘Why Knot? Towards a Theory of Art and
Mathematics’, in Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of
Enchantment, ed. Christopher Pinney and Nicholas Thomas (Oxford,
2001), p. 71.
62 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World-picture’, in The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York
and London, 1977), pp. 115–54.
63 Orit Halperin, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason since 1945
(Durham, nc, 2015), p. 21. References, to Beautiful Data, in the text
hereafter.
64 Claude Shannon, ‘A Mathematical Theory of Communication’, Bell
System Technical Journal, xxvii (1948), pp. 379–423, 623–56. Online
at http://worrydream.com.
65 Marcus du Sautoy, Finding Moonshine: A Mathematician’s Journey through
Symmetry (London, 2008), p. 12.
66 George D. Birkhoff, Aesthetic Measure (Cambridge, ma, 1933),
pp. 11–12, 4.
67 Max Bense, Raum und Ich: Eine Philosophie über den Raum (Berlin, 1934);
Konturen einer Geistesgeschichte der Mathematik: Die Mathematik und die
Wissenschaften, 2 vols (Hamburg, 1946–9); Technische Existenz: Essays
(Stuttgart, 1949); Aesthetica i: Metaphysische Beobachtungen am Schönen
(Stuttgart, 1954); Aesthetica ii: Aesthetische Information (Baden-Baden,
1956).
68 Birkhoff, Aesthetic Measure, p. 11.
69 Ibid., p. 200.
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

70 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith,

revd and ed. Nicholas Walker (Oxford, 2007), p. 75.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid., p. 81.

ten: Enough
1 A. J. Ayer, Metaphysics and Common Sense (San Francisco, ca, 1970),
p. 4.

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 Pho t o A cknowledg em e nt s

The author and publishers wish to express their thanks to the following for
illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it. Some locations of
works are given below rather than in the captions.

© adagp, Paris and dacs, London 2016: p. 238; Baltimore Museum of Art,
The Mary Frick Jacobs Collection, bma 1938.193: p. 165; Harvard University,
Houghton Library, Typ 520.03.736: p. 222; © Jasper Johns/vaga, New
York/dacs, London 2015: pp. 229, 230, 234, 235, 236; photo Richard
Rowley, www.richardrowley.net: p. 247; University College London: p. 228;
and the Wellcome Library, London, licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International license – you are free: to share – to copy,
distribute and transmit the work; to remix – to adapt the work – under the
following conditions: attribution – you must attribute the work in the
manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests
that they endorse you or your use of the work): p. 246.
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 Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations

aggregates 108–11 Bernstein, Roberta 232–3

‘aggregative fallacy’ 184–5 Bible 111–12, 115, 117–18
air conditioning 39 bibliomancy 117–19
algebra 242, 261 Birkhoff, G. D. 263
Andre, Carl 248 Borges, Jorge Luis 23–4, 257
anger 151–2 Bose–Einstein condensate 100
Archimedes 127–8 Boswell, James 65–6
Aristotle 192 Braque, Georges 231
Arnold, Matthew 75–6 Brontë, Charlotte 72
astragalus 164–6 Brown, Norman O. 67
Astrampsychos 118 Brown, Robert 177
Auden, W. H. 79 Buchholz, Hartmut 250
augmented reality 257 Burgess, Anthony 94
Ayer, A. J. 270
capitalism 13–14, 122–3, 124,
Badiou, Alain 13–14, 20, 44, 128, 270–71
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

196, 217 Carey, John 80

Ball, Philip 177 Carroll, Lewis 57, 67, 145, 243, 252,
Barthes, Roland 170 257
Bataille, Georges 151 Carroll, Noel 68
beauty 260–65 Caudwell, Christopher 107
Beckett, Samuel 8, 40–41, 62–3, Cavendish, Margaret 17–18
70, 87, 93, 105–6, 111, 136–7, chance 11, 16, 118–19, 161–4, 173,
141–6, 148 178–86, 189, 191–2, 197–8
Benjamin, Walter 98 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon,
Bense, Max 263 The Game of Knucklebones
Bentham, Jeremy 51, 153–5 (Les Osselets) 165
Bergson, Henri 87–8, 92, 96–100, Chaucer, Geoffrey 202
139, 141 chronos 60, 62
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clue, the 176 Dürer, Albrecht 248

code 44, 96 Melencolia i 14, 15
Collins, William 215 Dworkin, Ronald 184
conducting 210–11
Conrad, Joseph 101–2 economics 49, 270–71
contingency 162–3, 172 Edison, Thomas 100–101
continuity 93, 96, 98–101, 106 Einstein, Albert 177
counting 7, 28, 58, 59, 60, 63–6, Eliot, George 7, 73
68–9, 77, 104–6, 112, 115–7, Emerson, Ralph Waldo 73–5
134, 204–10, 214, 216, 217–20, Enigma machine 166
252 enjambment 212
taboo on 120 entropy 182, 187–8
count-as-one 20, 41, 122, 271 equivalence 146–7
Cowley, Abraham 201 ether 95
Crichton, Michael 233 Eubulides of Miletus 110
critique 268 Euler, Leonhard 242
cultures 193–4 exactness 70
explicitation (Sloterdijk) 42–3
Dadaism 180–81 events 196
Dahl, Roald 186
Daily Mail 9 Fairfax, Nathaniel 24, 42
death 58, 70, 78, 84, 148, 159, 216, Fechner, Gustav 88
220 ‘felicific calculus’ (Bentham) 153–5
de-burring 155–8 Fermat, Pierre 196
declarative knowledge 46–7, Feynman, Richard 209
257–8 Fibonacci sequence 64, 228
Deleuze, Gilles 48 field 28
Democritus 33–4, 98 Fish, Stanley 184–5, 196
demons 121–2, 124, 125 flatness 53–9
Dennett, Daniel 178 Forster, E. M. 79
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

Derrida, Jacques 124, 268 Foster, John 201

Descartes, René 225, 243, 249 Foucault, Michel 119, 245
Dickens, Charles 137–41, 149–50, Frege, Gottlob 77
153 Freud, Anna 214
Dickinson, Emily 41–2 Freud, Sigmund 40, 49, 50–51, 67,
digitization 33–7, 44–5 70, 85, 133, 150, 151, 159, 214,
dimension 226 263
discontinuity 93, 96, 97–101, 106 Fluxus 189
‘distant reading’ (Moretti) 174
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 121 Galileo Galilei 15, 164, 217
Douglas, Mary 248 Galton, Francis 77–8, 109, 226–7
Dryden, John 201 games 164, 167–8, 171, 251
Duchamp, Marcel 231 Gauss, Carl Friedrich 135–6

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 index

gears 107 James, William 48

geometry 242, 259 Jameson, Fredric 150
glossolalia 183 Jarvis, Simon 202, 215–16, 218–19
Goldbach, Christian 204 Johns, Jasper 231–7, 248
Golden Section 64, 173, 228, 259 0 through 9 235, 236
Goldsmith, Oliver 200 Gray Alphabets 234, 235
graphs 242 Map 235, 235
Gray, Jeremy 43 Numbers in Color 230
Greenaway, Peter 249–54 White Numbers 229, 232
grids 243–50 Johnson, Charlotte Buel 232
Johnson, Samuel 65
Hacking, Ian 11–12, 270 jokes 131–4, 137, 146, 149–50
Halperin, Orit 260, 261 Jongh, Karlyn de 239
Hamlet 25, 194 Jonson, Ben 116
Hardt, Michael 120–24, 125–6, 128 Joyce, James 24, 87, 88, 89, 93–6,
Hardy, G. H. 147–8 105
Hardy, Thomas 163
Hegel, G.W.F. 203 Kabbalah 115, 116
Heidegger, Martin 58, 260 Kafka, Franz 62
Helmholtz, Hermann von 95 kairos 60–62
Hendricks, Beci 190 Kannel, Theophilus van 101
Heschong, Lisa 39 Kant, Immanuel 113–14, 118, 128,
Higgins, Hannah B. 244 131–3, 263–4
Hippodamus of Miletus 244 Keats, John 41
history 195–6 Kermode, Frank 59–61
Hobbes, Thomas 116 Kersten, Fred 219–20
Hogarth, William 247–8 Khlebnikov, Velimir 231
Homer 118, 200 Klee, Paul 248
horror 58–9, 62, 67–8, 70, 148 knots 259
Horst, Pieter van der 117 Krauss, Rosalind 248, 249
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

humanities 7, 32, 45–7, 48–9, 51–2, Küchler, Susanne 259

178, 268 Kuenzel, Uwe 250
Hunt, Katherine 223, 224
Husserl, Edmund 77 Lakoff, George 18–19
Lanchner, Carolyn 232
immunology 186 Laplace, Pierre-Simon 192
indexing 266–7 Larkin, Philip 158, 242–3
infinity 129–30 Larson, John Augustus 255
information theory 49–50, 171–2, laughter 132–3, 146, 148–50
271 Laune, Thomas De 201
Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore-
Jaffe, Audrey 255 Lucien Ducasse) 247
James, Henry 38–9 Lawrence, D. H. 80–84, 87

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 l i v i n g b y n u m b e rs

Leavis, F. R. 76 Menninger, Karl 224

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 152–3, Meschonnic, Henri 202–3
160, 204–5, 206, 210, 217, 220 Michelangelo 231
Lennon, John 117 Middleton, Thomas 221
Leonardo da Vinci 231, 248 Mitchell, Wesley C. 155
Leucippus 33–4 modernism 43, 78–107, 248–9
Levin, Richard 116 modernity 42, 92, 96, 100–101, 107
Leviticus 248 Mondrian, Piet 231, 248
Lewis, Wyndham 92 Monod, Jacques 192
Lima, Manuel 257 monotheism 123
literature 72, 76–7, 161–7, 170–71, Morell, Thomas 202
173–4, 177 Moretti, Franco 174–6
Losev, A. F. 218 Morgan, Stuart 254
lots 119–20 Mori, Masahiro 255
Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus) Morris, Sienna 241
34 Morris, William 157–8
Lully, Jean-Baptiste 210 Morse Code 96
Lushetich, Natasha, 189–90 Morson, Gary Saul 192
Lyotard, Jean-François 60 multitude 111–14, 120–28
Mumford, Lewis 84–5
Macbeth 171 music 45, 94–5, 98, 199–220
Malevich, Kazimir 231, 248
Mallarmé, Stéphane 16, 78, 188–9 Nabokov, Vladimir 267
maps 257–8 Nancy, Jean-Luc 203
Martin, Agnes 248 Napoleon 73
Marx, Karl 124 Nead, Lynda 101
matching 20–22 Negri, Antonio 120–24, 125–6, 128
material imagination 51 Newsom, Robert 163–4
mathematics 12, 13, 15–19, 20–21, Niederland, William 214
24–5, 28, 32, 35, 37, 43–7, 50, nonsense 64–5, 134
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53, 55–7, 61, 62–4, 67, 70, numbers

73–5, 77–8, 81, 84, 86, 88, divination by 116–19
94–5, 106, 113–14, 128, 129–31, etymology of 15
134, 138–9, 144, 146–8, 154, Fermat 55–6
161, 188, 221, 223–4, 227, 231, horror of 124–5
242, 243, 249, 256, 258–64, indefinite 23–4
269 odd 9–10, 68–9, 146, 169
Maxwell, James Clerk 177, 181 painting by 228, 231
measure 9, 30–32, 38, 47, 51, 55, prime 130–31
57, 77, 92, 97, 108, 137, 151, and space 223–5, 236–7
153–7, 159–60, 210, 226, 255, subitizing 223–4
263 visualization of 77, 221–65
Meillassoux, Quentin 16 and words 13, 45, 134, 146, 147

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 index

numerology 15–16, 56–7, 59, 60 radiation 69, 174

numerosity 199–202, 205, 206 randomness 181
Nuñez, Rafael 18–19 Ray, Man 231
reader 162
oneness 66–7 Recorde, Robert 225
Opałka, Roman 63, 237–41 redundancy 171–2, 175, 216, 267
1965/1–∞, Detail 1-35327 238 Reinhardt, Ad 248
ordinality 7, 34–5, 61, 102, 105, 216 Reisch, Gregor, Margarita
philosophica 222
Palais, Richard S. 256 religion 123, 125–6
Parable of the Sower 27–8 rereading 170, 174
Pascal, Blaise 164, 196 Reynolds, Malvina 259–60
Pater, Walter 75 rhyme 200–201, 203
Peele, James 224–5 rhythm 202–4, 206, 210, 216
Perceval, John 208–9 Richards, I. A. 263
Petrakis, John 249 riddles 117
phenomenology 77 Rorty, Richard 54
physics 260 Rotman, Brian 129–30
place-value 224–5 Rowley, William 221
Planck, Max 29, 85 Russell, Bertrand 66, 96, 97, 99
Plato 14, 25
pleasure 149–52, 155, 159–60, Sacks, Oliver 29–32, 204, 205–7
220 Sade, Marquis de 61–2
polygraph 255 Sartre, Jean-Paul 128
Poovey, Mary 78 Saussure, Ferdinand de 224
precision 38–9 scale 34, 79–88, 107
printing 35–6 Schopenhauer, Arthur 204, 220
probability 12, 27–8, 161, 163–4, Schwitters, Kurt 231
168–78, 186–7, 191–2, 194–7, Second Law of Thermodynamics
217 181–2
Copyright © 2016. Reaktion Books, Limited. All rights reserved.

procedural knowledge 46–7, 257 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 211–14

proof 131 Seeger, Pete 260
Puttenham, George 199–200, 202, Serres, Michel 33, 42, 46–7, 49–50,
206, 209 93, 126–7, 129, 158, 217–18,
Pynchon, Thomas 244–5 257
Pythagoras 44, 68, 95, 217–18 Seidenberg, Abraham 120
seriality 135
quantality 29–32, 45, 48, 49, 50, Sewell, Elizabeth 64–5, 134
51–2, 62, 128, 202, 218, 264, Shakespeare, William 26, 38, 40,
269, 271 68–9, 189, 194, 207, 222
Quetelet, Adophe 177 Shannon, Claude 49, 260–61
quincunx 227, 228 Sinclair, May 87, 89–91
singularity 83–4

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 l i v i n g b y n u m b e rs

Sloterdijk, Peter 42–3, 49, 123, ‘uncanny valley’ (Masahiro Mori)

151–2 255
Small, Christopher 45 undecidability 190
sortilege 117 utilitarianism 137, 153–5, 160
sound 227
spanking 211–14 Valéry, Paul 78
speech 36 Virgil 117, 118
speedometer 92 voice 216–17
sport 151
Sprat, Thomas 201 Wadham, Edward 200
Stewart, Garrett 41, 94, 101 Warhol, Andy 248
Stilt Soccer 190–91 Warminski, Andrzej 114
switch 92–3 weather 33, 194–5
symmetry 262 Weber, Ernst 88
Whitehead, A. N. 25, 26–7, 37,
tables 245, 247–8 43
Taleb, Nassim Nicholas 164 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 144
Terence (Publius Terentius Afer) Woolf, Virginia 84, 85–7, 102–5
8–9 work 157–9
Thompson, Francis 38–9
time 24–6, 156–7, 239 Yeats, W. B. 112–13
Tomlin, Rebecca 224–5
translation 40–41 Zeno 96–7, 99, 100
Travelling Salesman Problem 67 zero 132, 224
Tubbs, Robert 231 zombies 124–5
Tzara, Tristan 177–80, 187
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